Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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This is a good essay.

It's interesting to contrast it with some of the psychological/self-help literature around being your "true self", where the true self is fluid and amorphous and avoids being rigidly defined. Or with Drew Houston's commmencement address [1] - "That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best." Or Steve Jobs [2] - "Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

Don't ignore your emotions, particularly the niggling feelings that make you do things that seem to have no purpose in your grand plans but nevertheless draw you along. Don't ignore reality either - that'd be putting art galleries online - but oftentimes our subconscious has a better grip on reality than we give it credit for.

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2013/drew-houstons-commencement-address

[2] https://singjupost.com/full-transcript-steve-jobs-stay-hungr...

> So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Equally plausible is that we only write quotations from the people whose dots serendipitously connected.

I mean, they have for all of us at some point.

No, not for great wealth perhaps, but using myself as an example - the fact that I'm in my own apartment across the country from where I grew up, with an engineering job, that pays well enough for me to afford an expensive pocket computer cum telephone to write this on - anyone of those things alone would have blown the mind of 18 year old me - all three of them as one combined train is astonishing in hindsight. If I look at all the just that I've done in the last 20 years, I'm ought to be astonished, I've been stupendously lucky.

Now for a moment, look at all the dots connected to get where we are technologically over the last, 20, 40, 80, 120 years. For example just in communications, In 120 years we went from messages for the average person taking months to span the globe, to a situation where the average person in any country, can phone another average person in most any other country at anytime day or night without difficulty - that alone is astonishing to me. Never mind all the other improvements we've watched blink into existence.

The dots connect for everyone, some folks just get more of them.

Now you're talking about technological change and about how we're all living potentially richer and more interesting lives because of it. But that's a separate point to the one being discussed: Jobs was referring to personal life choices and how they work out if you connect the dots looking back.

Point being that there's plenty of people for whom personal life choices didn't see their dots connect looking back, and that we only get quotations from the people who do like Jobs, i.e. his point perhaps isn't universal, but rather only particular to (the lucky) few.

Another poster just commented: meheleventyone 3 hours ago - Yeah we had a very emotional essay this week from Chris Crawford whose life work failed to materialise.

He looked back and found that his dots never connected for the past decades and that 'he blew it'. The fact he now has an iPhone and can make cheap calls to a person in India doesn't change that story.

My personal dots did connect, largely, thats my point. I took a highly unconventional path to where I am in life, and feel lucky for making it.

You said "they have for all of us at some point" and "The dots connect for everyone, some folks just get more of them", in response to someone saying we only really hear about success stories, which is very different to the point you now say you were making. For a lot of people, the dots just don't connect.

Here's a good argument why the dots will connect eventually as long as you keep doing interesting things. One of my favorite books: https://davidepstein.com/the-range/

> the dots will connect eventually ...

To paraphrase Keynes, eventually we're all dead.

Yeah we had a very emotional essay this week from Chris Crawford whose life work failed to materialise.

Interesting. I interpreted that as one of his favorite projects failing to thrive. If you look at his blog, or remember much of his career, he did a lot of stuff.

Right but his focus since the dragon speech has failed to materialise. He’s done a lot of things in that time but towards the goal articulated there. So understandably he regrets the way his dots connected.

I'm having trouble finding this. Any title or other info that you remember? I don't see it on his web page.

This is the HN thread for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26139348

Connecting the dots is not entirely random. You can choose to do stuff that connects them. And maybe only connect some. In PGs case for example there's quite a lot of connection with lisp, startups and writing, though the painting never really seems to have been terribly useful.

I'd say highly probable. But it's always a good story.

A bit of both surely. There's going to be a lot of selection bias, but you should always be asking yourself "is this the kind of thing that might connect with other things in the future?".

tl;dr When in doubt, study maths.

I agree, this is a good one. It's a bit rare to get retrospectives like this. Typically they tend to fall into one of three categories: the 'great-man' biography, which are more history lessons than anything else. The very poor and/or very unlucky people, those born into genetic diseases, addicted families, or some bad misfortune. And the middling and very unread section of otherwise perfectly normal people without much to say.

PG here bridges the gap between the 'great-man' and the middling-man. With a fair bit of luck, he manages to become wealthy, but not wanna-be-space-cadet wealthy. It's an under read area and full of very good lessons in that bridge of worlds. I'm not in that bridge, so my take-aways weren't as much. But perhaps with some luck, I'll be able to revisit this in the future for more savoring.

> With a fair bit of luck, he manages to become wealthy, but not wanna-be-space-cadet wealthy.

You might be underestimating the value of the YC portfolio and PG's stake in it.

It's 'only' ~$50M or so [0], per what I could find with a quick googling. Other resources would be appreciated though!

[0] https://www.wealthypersons.com/paul-graham-net-worth-2020-20...

This article suggests that he and JL were half of a self-funded YC that took 6% of each company they funded. The YC portfolio is estimated at $300 billion from a random article I just Googled.

3% of that would be nine billion, assuming all four YC founders had equal shares and disregarding dilution as the portfolio companies took on more investors.

Likely off by an order of magnitude in one direction or the other but still fair bit higher than 50 million.

Welp, yeah, nevermind then, he's in wanna-be-space-cadet tax brackets.

The world is non linear, with discrete inflection points. Some of those points are outside of your control, but some are points where you made an important decision that correctly anticipated a non linear outcome. All positive non linear outcomes take time to compound, however, hence why you can’t connect the positive dots until enough time has passed to look back.

What do you mean by non linear there?

not this, but something like this:

    |                                     
    |                                   | 
    |                                  /  
    |                                  |  
    |                                 /   
    |                                /    
    |                                |    
    |                               /     
    |                      -              
    |                     /   \           
    |                   -/     |          
    |                  /       \          
    |                           |         
    |         ---                         
    |    ----/     -\                     
    | --/            -                    
    |                                     
    |                                     
    +------------------------------------+

You meet someone who takes your life in a different direction.

The distant past has a disproportionate effect on the future.

Well put

there are many paths to Yes.

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