Early Work
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
The best innovators are really good at taking Version 1.0 and figuring out what rework will turn it into a better 2.0, and then 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, etc. This is an identifiable skill! It can be cultivated. Once you've got it, the failings of Version 1.0 do not ruin your self-esteem. You just get to work on fixing them. And not enough people think about this systematically.
One of my favorite museum stops of all time was the British Library, where a glass case held Paul McCartney's first draft of "Yesterday." You could see, cross-out by cross-out, how a somewhat awkward ballad got turned into a pop classic.
I'll submit that almost everything that looks like genius from a distance is a lot of step-by-step craft when viewed more closely. I did some consulting at Facebook in 2008 and it was quite amazing seeing how rapidly and incessantly Team Zuckerberg was not just adding features, but also rejiggering the way the feed worked; the layout, the everything.
Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Also, Michelangelo did drafts and studies. So why can't I?
Yeah...but the other side of that depends on what the definition of “dodgy” is.
For example, say we have a server-based app. If the DB schema is badly-designed (usually overcomplicated), then we are truly pooched, as we’ll start to figure that out after we have a few thousand users.
If the DB design is OK, even if it is primitive and simple, then we can have naive, problematic code, yet plenty of room to grow.
I’ve learned to design for the unknown. It’s really paid off, for me, but YMMV.
Choosing your bias depends on your field. In a safety critical field, you rather want to be safe than sorry. In web development, move fast and break things. This isn't hard though. You usually know which side you prefer when in doubt.
Second is GitHub - the first few hundred commits of many successful open-source projects. It is a wonder to see sprawling codebases starting at its first commit, and plodding its way over years before gathering momentum.
The creator stuck with it though and the quality improved dramatically and pretty quickly.
I think it's actually from 2009 though, since wikipedia says that was the first episode? It was just uploaded later I guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joe_Rogan_Experience
Still, it's crazy how much video has improved in quality, and exploded in popularity, since just 2009 or 2013 ... damn.
I guess this is a little like early bloggers in the early 2000's who were already writers in other mediums.
The people who are really successful are the ones involved in the old paradigm (multiple TV shows in Rogan's case), AND who actually embrace the new paradigm.
You don't notice it if you're subscribing/following the comic, until you jump back to an earlier strip and see how much less skilled the early work was.
Compare this: (https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3) to this version of the same strip, drawn much later: (https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1601). That’s the same artist. There was no abrupt change in style, either, the artist’s style just slowly changed over time.
Almost as large an improvement can be seen by comparing this first strip: (https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2000-06-12) with the same strip, redrawn much later: (https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2020-07-27). Same thing there; same artist, no abrupt change in style, just slow improvements over time.
e.g.
Wayback machine:
- Airbnb (2008): https://web.archive.org/web/20080310025433/http://www.airbed...
- Uber (2010): https://web.archive.org/web/20101126114649/http://www.uberap...
- Twitter (2006): https://web.archive.org/web/20061127012643/http://twitter.co...
Show HN:
- Analytics.js / Segment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076
- Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
https://www.wolfstad.com/2008/12/my-top-5-websites-of-2008/
I think expectations have evolved and the minimum standards of aesthetics in 2020 presents a higher bar. I wonder if an MVP that looked like that would work in 2020? I'm guessing the bar these days is at least a Bootstrap UI.
Carmageddon was especially easy to mod because it was all self-documented data files in .txt format [1] and you could mess with literally everything from graphics to physics.
The huge difference between this and now is that if I wanted to mess around with any kind of game I would need an IDE - which for a kid without a technical parent/mentor/friend would be a non-starter.
But at the same time it's never been easier to make a game from scratch in a whole host of different and easy to use engines.
This is an important and often overlooked aspect to creativity.
When people get into some thing, they naturally compare themselves to the people out there that are best at that thing. In Ye Olden days before the Internet and social media meant literally the world's best examples of every single thing were right at your fingertips, the "best" often meant "the best in your town" and the level of difference between your novice skill and that was not so great as to be disheartening.
But now, the first day you ever decide to fry an egg, you can watch Gordon Ramsey and Jacques Pépin do it and watch your soul die with the realization that you'll never reach that level. Or you pick up a guitar, then go to YouTube and see some kid who's been practicing twelve hours a day since infancy and lose all hope.
A somewhat perverse trick to combat that is what I think of as low ceilings. If the thing you get into has some limit to how good you can be at it, then the difference between you and the world's best isn't so great that it kills your motivation. I'm an ex-game developer, and I've seen how many people really love PICO-8 and other deliberately constrained game making environments. I think a big part of that is because when you're making a PICO-8 game, you aren't comparing yourself to the world's best games, but just to the best PICO-8 games. Those can be surprisingly impressive too, but they don't feel so unattainably distant from your own first steps.
If you don't want to choose a medium that is instrinsically limited, another approach is to find a scene. Find a group of like-minded individuals at roughly the same skill level as you. Enough better than you to inspire you, but not so far that you don't feel you could ever reach their level. Immerse yourself in that group, an you'll naturally compare yourself to them and not the world at large.
Back when I used to be in a band, we played shows in small venues with other local bands. I knew we were never going to be the next Oasis or Tom Petty, but "Orlando's third-best rock band" was close enough within reach to be worth striving for, and it really helped keep me going.
On the other hand, that same thing can inspire you.
I was never a musically inclined kid in any way, shape or form. Nobody in my family played, I never had an instrument as a child, but when I heard Days of the New for the first time, I ran to Guitar Center and bought an acoustic.
For about a month, I practiced and played and played. I never got anywhere, gave up after a month, and looking back on it, I should have realized that level of playing was going to be years away, even if I had a professional teacher. But I didn't care at the time.
It is extremely important to tune guitar perfectly. I tune it before each session and found it usually got slightly out of tune if I don't enjoy playing anymore. It is surprisingly hard to sing while playing, it fills mind while hands gets practice.
It is easy to excel in first months because there is not much yet. Playing without looking at guitar, working on posture, accurate timing (not tempo!). Find something to enjoy, Brushy One String plays one string and it drives [1] .
on the flip side, most skills seem to respond asymptotically to practice/effort (rapid progress at the beginning, diminishing returns near the top). the very best guitar players in the world are not radically more technically proficient than the classical/jazz guitarists at your local conservatory. you can see this in esports a lot. players come out of the woodwork all the time who have trained hard and smart at a game for two or three years and dethrone people who have literally been playing since they were eight.
being the world's best X is usually more about gaining proficiency in adjacent skills Y and Z and having a bit of luck than it is about being lightyears ahead of everyone else at X itself. this is how roger federer dominated tennis for so long. he wasn't the world's best at any one stroke, but each one of his strokes was among the best, and he invested heavily in a style of play that was uncommon on the tour at that time.
> Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?
> A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
> And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.
> And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
"Talent is feeling how should not be."
The rest is accurate though. It does take a lot of grit and working through lots and lots of bad stuff. Developing a creative talent can be a pretty horrible experience because of that ;P
Many years ago, when I was in a youth choir and we were practicing a lot for a festival, I asked our director why we sounded worse at each practice. His explanation was that we actually sounded better, but that our analytical abilities developed even quicker than our singing skills.
I think that is what the GP is referring to as "taste". You already have that intuitive sense that some things suck and others are good. What you need to develop, as you say, is being able to tell exactly why something isn't good when it isn't, so you can fix it.
This sucks, because...
This doesn’t suck.
The three phases
You might know what a good painting looks like, but you can't move your arm in the right way to create those strokes. You don't know how to mix the paints to get the colors you want. When you are sketching out a scene, you're not quite adept at positioning elements of a scene on the page to have the aesthetics you're aiming for.
Another thing this reminds me of is learning how to dance. It's easy to watch someone walk through steps and mentally you know exactly how they are moving, but you just can't quite move your body in the same way. Super frustrating! What's worse is the first time you watch a video of you dancing. There's a huge disconnect between how you think you look and how you actually look and it's quite discouraging.
But yes, it's important to remember that even in fields with famous examples of luminaries like that, there are still countless other experts who practiced and practiced and continually got better to achieve their expertise out of willpower more than sheer transcendent prodigy.
But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.
I sometimes think about what sets successful and less successful countries apart, and how profound an effect can cultures have. Assuming that smart people are born everywhere at similar rate, and disregarding unfree societies with authoritative regimes or paralysing religious dogmas, I would naively expect similar outcomes among countries. I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture, but I guess I will never know.
- You're not to think you are anything special.
- You're not to think you are as good as we are.
- You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
- You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
- You're not to think you know more than we do.
- You're not to think you are more important than we are.
- You're not to think you are good at anything.
- You're not to laugh at us.
- You're not to think anyone cares about you.
- You're not to think you can teach us anything.
I believe you can have a grasp of the magnitude of it by thinking that people are the product of their birth (genes and whatever) and their experience. Certainly we can think of experience as very significative in the way people act and think. Also if you replace the word experience by education (see as being the same thing here), you end up with anything from study environment, to culture to politics that actually determine a lot how people behave.
That's actually my main criticism of the politics in my country. It's not so much that the politicians are saying dumb things, they actually are great people if you look closely. It's just that their politic is not how I would "educate" people, the way people experiences it is the bad part in my feeling.
In short, I think those impulses have a lot to do with experience/education.
Singaporean here. I've seen this "crabs in a bucket" mentality since the days of formal education. It's often known as being "kiasu" (afraid of losing to others, in Hokkien dialect) [1] in the 90's.
These days, it's sometimes known as the "sinkie pwn sinkie" phenomenon [2].
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/kiasu-is-oxford-engli...
[2] http://asingaporeanson.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-sinkie-pwn-s...
At a very basic level, it affects children at school. To excel at school is looked down on, here, which leads to the smart kids keeping their heads down and trying to fit in with the average kids. One benefit of immigration from countries with higher approval of academic success is that in many schools you are no longer looked down on for doing well, and I look forward to seeing how that affects the future of my country.
It's ~100x harder to create than critique. I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?" People will freely tell you the latter, but rarely the former.
On the other hand a lot of people spend too much energy trying to support the idea, which often is a reflection of confirmation bias / wishful thinking in their thought process.
It's funny, this. According to the movie, they just ask MZ to clone another uni's digital facebook. Presumably because that one worked well enough.
Sure, for an idea to become suddenly very good you either have to rely on technology advancements / innovation, as in the case for cannons that before Napoleon were unreliable and dangerous, or you have to make a controlled bet to test your hypothesis, as in the case of Venture Capital that invests in hundreds of startups (selected according to their investment model) estimating that a small percentage of them will turn out successful.
So my key point is, if an idea becomes very good (i.e. through innovation) it'll be harder to invalidate it, and if you invest in an idea that you aren't comfortable with yet (i.e. venture capital) there'll be a higher risk attached to it.
This. VCs have an endless supply of disposable entrepreneurs in their portfolio.
For every 1 person that has PG's version of edgy, devil-may-care entrepreneurialism and succeeds, there's 99 that fail. VCs operate more like brokers than entrepreneurs. The only place they're not playing a numbers game is in fostering business connections and hiring.
Acting as if the SV financial Goliath is David is just, I dunno, old. That assembly line has been cranking out the same "apply software to an existing problem" model for a long time now. And they do it because it works, and actually building things takes longer, has less leverage because of up-front capital, and is much higher risk (and taxation).
A recurring thought I've had for years: the latter -- "why won't this work?" -- seems like a fairly common mindset for Eastern European engineers schooled in the 1960s. Brilliant people who need to understand everything to the bare essentials. And -- they produce strikingly simple solutions to almost every technical problem in the house.
Fairly often, though, this mindset seems to come with quite a complicated, uneasy personality.
My dad was a kind person, but I remember something he said about his civil engineering studies in the 1970s Soviet Union: for certain exams, not a single mistake was allowed. One wrong answer, and you failed. For if you build a house and miscalculate (e.g.) the needed strength of a crucial beam, you'll risk with fatalities.
I'm not an engineer, and I've always been in the "why might this work" boat myself. But I do understand this critical view precisely for that reason. For a lot of occupations, there is no unlimited Ctrl+Z.
As well as ability to track things being worked on sorted by priority. I currently do that part in Notion. (https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/ideas)
Working in public on anything is very useful too as there is a long time inbetween making something and 'truly releasing' something. I remember the talk on how https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent started off as a simple readme. Got lots of interest & comments and only then was the idea validated and got built on, already with community.
Here is the great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqnvKP1DYRI
https://www.notion.so/nikitavoloboev/Project-generator-3cd74...
"Many a-times, brilliant young people join an organisation and want to start right at the top or at a glamorous role. They get aggrieved when they are not given the shiny, glamorous role that commands respect or gives social proof. This tends to result in them doing a poor job of whatever role they have been given.
I posit that we can learn from the Tesla story described above. Take the job and prove yourself once an opportunity presents itself. It might not be what you envisioned last year before the pandemic and lockdown. It’s important to get into the door and then set the standards to where you believe you belong."
I guess the answer depends on your point of view if the world and humans.
I don't see the point in trying to prove yourself in most situations, since most organizations have little opportunity.
I just quit my first tech job. The first team I was on had very little agency and was basically told what to do, the second team I was on had an "architect" who dictated how everything was going to be.
Without going into boring details, I was told by management and other team members I was doing well and it showed compared to most of the other Juniors I worked with.
I don't want a glamorous role, or one that gives me social proof. I just want to have some agency and the opportunity to take on responsibility and advance.
It seems like that's hard to come by, though.
I don't know your story but I've been tech lead in a team with to many juniors, bad idea. I've struggled to give them agency, they were arguing about placing spaces and braces, there were cases of designing not so great API, mutating frameworks private variables and defending as "own vision". Promising juniors left, I've left.
Finding good team is hard. It is often ruined by management.
Not really a good defense of Silicon Valley, considering that Tim Draper was Theranos's first investor and a pretty big proponent of them https://twitter.com/RebeccaJarvis/status/974435962930548736
Theranos' fundraising was primarily from outside of SV: "Documents unsealed in a lawsuit brought against Theranos reveal a number of the high profile investors who had a stake in the nearly worthless start-up: The Waltons, founders of Walmart, with $150 million; Rupert Murdoch, with $125 million; and the DeVos family, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, with $100 million. The investments were made between 2013 and 2015, according to the Journal." - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/theranos-devos-other-investo...
In Theranos' earliest SEC filing, "Draper Fisher Jurvetson Fund VII, L.P." is listed as a Beneficial Owner.
Filing Date 2005-01-03
File/File Number 021-72626 05000011
pg, and others pushing back against the Theranos-as-an-indictment-of-Silicon-Valley-venture-capital narrative, are talking about the firms that invested much larger sums after Elizabeth Holmes had gotten a lot of good press and become a hot commodity (and, in most cases, after she'd started engaging in fraud, unbeknownst to most). Those firms lost their shirts in a way that DFJ didn't.
It seems like a weird point to nit-pick, but in most of PG's essays, there are so few demonstrably easy-to-disprove facts. This one is easy. And the misplaced hubris in thinking zero SV firms were foolish enough to invest in a fraud makes you question all his other assertions.
You do not need to cultivate this personality trait in our culture. Far more people go too far with this than not far enough, myself included.
Overconfident people believe they know more than they actually do, so they are more eager to criticize your novel idea. This is the type of thinking Graham says he wants to avoid in earlier paragraphs.
Instead of cultivating overconfidence through the deadly sin of pride, we should cultivate increasing true confidence through the cardinal virtue of courage. You can build your confidence by taking greater and greater courageous action. Courage is the choice to confront pain, ridicule, and the unknown all for an uncertain reward.
Graham says, "being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own." Acting courageously does this much, much better. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if Graham agreed. The rest of the essay does a pretty good job explaining how to go about acting courageously, just without using the word.
Overconfidence hurts when reality catches. Low expectations helps to recover.
I disagree. Being overconfident compensates for the amount of luck you need to succeed. If 100 people are overconfident, and 5 of them succeed, it paid off for these 5 to be overconfident - because when you have that kind of luck, overconfidence is the appropriate level of confidence.
For an excellent demonstration of the importance of luck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I&vl=en
So when we see a crappy project that took a few months to create, we naturally assume that it will be slightly less crappy in a few more months. We can't even imagine what it would look like if it was 100x more useful in 9 months. Even PG and other great early investors only have a slight notion of what that would look like.
EDIT: Or, rather, I agree with the point you're making, but I think it's pretty commonly-held belief.
For judging ideas, you should pay even more attention to regrets. Your choice is a psychological anchor, so if you chose poorly you may not know it as your brain will automatically try to justify your choices, but if you find yourself angry at past rejections you’ve made on an idea, that’s probably regret talking to you, and that means you’ve been subconsciously haunted by something you should be paying more attention to.
Now I’ve learned to note what upsets me about an idea and at times dig in deeper and consider it extra points towards the idea.
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." -- Linus Torvalds on comp.os.minix in 1991
It's sad that there exists any cynicism around creation at all. Our ability to create might be the most human of our qualities. We literally make the world we live in.
The creations that excite me most are those that enable people to create even more. I really appreciate what PG is saying here, what he believes, and the dream factory that is YC.
Founders are in a similar situation, but since they're almost universally adults, we tend to apply adult prejudices to their work.
"But it's a bit strange that you have to play mind games with yourself to avoid being discouraged by lame-looking early efforts."
Unfortunately, I don't see anyone over there talking about conquering fear permanently, such that these issues fall away and what is left is boundless creativity.
One tool offered here is to "switch polarity", which means to take the other side of the argument. Fine, but real wisdom comes from transcending polarity.
Another tool offered is to tap into the motivation of curiosity. That's great as "early work" on the inner game, but there are much more robust ways to conquer fear when one looks at cutting edge work on consciousness evolution, such as Integral Dynamics, or studies Eastern traditions like Vajrayana or Zen.
I look forward to the day where YC elevates this discussion toward awakening themselves and their network to more transcendental tools.
Like you I think the concept has huge potential, and I've found some modalities that you haven't mentioned but that I've found particularly powerful, and could be more broadly beneficial for founders and creators generally.
Feel free to hit me up (email in profile, or in Bookface) if you want to connect and discuss further. (Offer is open to anyone else interested too.)
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” ― Carl Jung
I've never been as active as I wanted in my young years due to weak health, and recently started engaging in outdoor activities I always wanted to do (long-distance hiking, climbing, scuba diving), mostly because I don't enjoy hitting the gym and looking at a wall, but I didn't anticipate the benefit it would have in my psyche.
Now, when faced w/ hardships of life or random sources of stressors, I can relate back to some past experience and think "hey, I did that crazy thing, of course I can handle this other thing here". I don't know if this psychological phenomena has a name, I would only describe as "developing thick skin". I think it also happens naturally to individuals who had a hard upbringing and are hard working nonetheless. Maybe there's some idea to explore here.
You want to control fear. Put it in a little box so that it's a signal and not a dictator. Process it so that you're aware of what precisely is making you afraid and can rationally think of ways to mitigate that concern. Fear is a reason to be vigilant and aware, not a reason to freeze up and stop doing what you're doing.
In meditation what you want is to become aware of your feelings/emotions/sensations to a level where you can then very consciously choose what to do when something happens, instead of triggering a knee-jerk reaction.
Wim Hof has been making the rounds on HN lately. His latest book just came out, and I would recommend anyone who is looking for a super straightforward and practical way of systematically facing and overcoming fear, to check out either the book or just download the Wim Hof method app to do the breathing and the cold showers. You really don't need to "believe" anything, just need to try out the basic exercises and see what you feel, then decide if it's something that you want to keep doing or not.
Constant reinforcement made by little, constant and almost predictable successes. Read the psychological literature on self confidence (but skip bloggers and influencers)
I suggest real transcendence of polarity comes from holding both sides of the argument in your mind at the same time until they merge, and spending some time really understanding the other side than the one you're attracted to is a route there.
Don't let little things like failure or poor quality stop you from trying. This is normal. Embrace it, learn, and keep doing things.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Another reason to have lower standards initially is so you can properly measure the intensity of a problem. The harder your product is to use, the better the gauge for how much people truly want it.
Either a) people use your product despite its shoddiness or b) people complain about what more they want
And if people don't do either, well then it was just a "quick hack" to keep iterating from.
I'm more cynical. Investors benefit from the illusion of success, whether it is real or not. They can invest in something they don't think will succeed if PR and marketing can increase the valuation.
Most days, I feel like doing nothing. But some days, the computer calls to me, and it would be foolish to ignore it. If I’ve done anything impressive, it’s during those days.
But why? And can those days be maximized? Is it strictly a product of one’s environment? It can’t be; the institute for advanced study showed that you can have a perfect environment but make no progress.
I enjoy the late afternoon hours when most of my colleagues are already gone, the phone rings not as often and I can put some music on headphones. Takes me about 15 minutes till I get into the flow state and am highly productive.
For me its not that I don't feel like doing work on most days. Instead I have periods where I am super uber productive and days where I feel completely exhausted. I can't tell if its a mental thing or rather there's actually something physically wrong Lol. My mind tends to be blurry like its rebelling and if I force myself to work hard I start feeling feverish. I have trouble figuring out if I'm not working hard enough or working too hard.
I wonder if its also like that for some of the successful startup founders out there too
But it's a good point! Faith fluctuates by day, and those low-faith days are when a small project is abandoned. I think graham's solutions (supportive friends, ambitious city, historical examples) are a good way to hold the faith when the general public and the project itself don't seem to warrant it.
I went undiagnosed for such a long time because managers would often point at me as an example of startup dedication, and then when I crashed and they got disappointed I would jump to a new startup.
Now I stick to a schedule and never deviate from it. When I do, the monster returns.
I've tried to examine correlations between my focus at work and my sleep schedule, diet, social life, etc. and I don't really see anything. sometimes my best weeks of work will coincide with eating bad takeout and staying up til 2am playing factorio every night. sometimes I go to bed at 10pm, eat three healthy meals a day, and accomplish absolutely nothing at work.
The big things for me have been to eat a very nutritionally heavy breakfast (I hate eating breakfast, it still takes me forever) and to calorie count both to make sure I'm getting enough and to make sure I'm getting a decent balance of carbs/protein/fat. For sleep, going to sleep early and having wind down time so I sleep well (tea and a book are a winning combo for me there usually).
Stress is of course the difficult one we have the least control over. Exercise is a huge help but that can also change up the nutrition equation. Even then, it's still easy for bad stress days to also muck up the sleep side of the equation and it can take days to get that sorted out.
OK nothing happens without optimism and work and cynically excluding everything will leave you with nowhere to go, but the solution to that can't be optimistically including everything. If you want to lose lots of money, look at the penny stock market and think of all the ways those companies could become massive instead of looking for reasons they won't. Think of all the reasons alterntive cancer treatments could work, all the reasons UFOs could exist, all the reasons giving money to the local mega-church could be a good idea.
It's way to easy for most of us to convince ourselves of the happy path of a bunch of nonsense, and it's cynicism which keeps us away from the worst excesses of woo and hype and being conned or abused.
It's easy to think of reasons online grocery delivery "could work" during COVID19 in 2020, but if you were doing that in 1999 and investing in Webvan you'd have lost everything. Webvan "could work" and you could have thought of many reasons why, and you would have lost all your money. The people thinking why it couldn't work saved their bacon. Boo.com online fashion in 1999, the people thinking why it couldn't work saved their money and time and effort, even though online clothes shopping totally could work and does today.
Or that thinking of reasons why you could learn painting is irrelevant if you don't want to spend your time painting. You may as well rule it out first instead of challenging yourself all the ways you could become good at it and fit it into your life.
An easier way than seeing them as a challenge is to method act the ideas. The source of new ideas is often a new, lived experience. I think of how AirBnB was in the beginning: links from CraigsList to a website where host and guest could message. Payment was in person and in cash! The lived experience of being your own BnB rather than going through all the bureaucratic and government hoops was there, it just needed to be coded.
I see this more concisely written as:
One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work __is the fear is fear itself__
Anyone have some examples? I have some.
* For example, not taking a job upon offer, for fear of failing.
* I witness some mananger's/companies inducing fear, rather than embrace failure as one of the options. Without enabling high risk, high reward, people settle for safer low risk and mediocre results.
I think some of the best works also results from beginners. They add the new perspective needed & creative flair as new source of input.
This is also why I don't really buy in to the whole "conciseness" thing - I prefer things spelled out. I suspect many others do too.
Sure, lameness could be one. But I think it is rooted in fear of something else.
Fear of failure. Fear of judgement. Fear of mistakes. ...
I would argue lameness (as those listed here above) are still abstract. Are you saying you cannot move towards defining and understanding what is causing the fear when you create something lame?
And, although PG is in the Silicon Valley bubble (where only cool things happen, and it's the hub of cool in tech, duh), the advice he has is fairly general. In the board game creator community there's a lot of advice on making things that fail and making things that don't sell "for the fun of making the thing," because let's face it... most of your shit doesn't sell and never has any market value, but that doesn't make it any less useful or instructive.
TL;DR: Being okay with "failure" is a major part of any profession or hobby, and isn't intrinsic to Silicon Valley or VC backed startups...
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Of course, there's no telling how much extra baggage you've stored in the word "overconfidence" here, but without overconfident risk takers, there aren't many people left to do the job.
A population of 10% crazy dreamers is inspiring. A population of 90% crazy dreamers is maybe inspiring in limited doses. Being surrounded by that kind of person, every day, all the time, is tedious and uninspiring. I can see how it's great for investors (who only really care about that 1 success in 100), but for the other 99 people involved, it's enough to make you very cynical.
The only trick I've found that helps with this 'problem' is only do one new thing at a time.
Any evidence to back up this claim? Maybe it's true for SV where there are a lot of angel investors. For me, the biggest blocker for starting a "lame" idea is money. Ideally, Fuck-You Money + capital to prove the business model.
An example of lame idea: A new footwear company. The main goal would be to optimize for minimal waste. Shoes designed to last 10x the time. The would cost more to purchase, but the cost per month would be the same - so something like a subscription model would need to be in place.
No one would pay $350 for a pair of shoes from an unknown company, but if I'd offer them for $3/month it's a different story.
I tried entering "tpu" which broke it. :) But then I tried "test" which worked. Nice site!
No, the biggest thing holding people back from doing great work is resources. Everything else is a distant concern.
Remember what Y Combinator does? It connects people with resources, to people who claim they'll do great work.
Good, boring, mundane redistribution of resources from old rich people to young capable people. Good, do more of that and please spare us your 'wisdom' - it leads to bullshit artists whose sole skill is 'appreciating' your 'wisdom' to insert themselves into the process and ruin the whole thing.
It's only after you get past the fear, does the need for more resources come into play.
In the passage you quoted, PG is talking about an earlier stage than that. ("They're too frightened even to start.")