Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

programminggeek

John Carmack is equally brilliant and lucky in the same way that Michael Jordan is/was. Both found their life's work at a very young age and pursued it relentlessly. Because they found what they love so young and had such incredible work ethics, they achieved incredible things that put most mere mortals to shame.

Natural talent was obviously a factor, but so was the hard work and practice that they got at ages much younger than most of their peers. Both JC and MJ spent their teens practicing when others were playing. It wasn't forced, it was what they wanted to do.

I learned to code pretty much the same way. I'm no John Carmack, but when my peers entered college and were just starting to learn Java, I had been building games and weird little projects in C++ and Java for like 6 years. I naturally had an edge after that.

Finding what you love to do early in life and practicing that like crazy is a rare and wonderful thing.

Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, John Carmack, Michael Jordan, Eminem, Metallica, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Wozniak, all seem to have this kind of thing in common.

This is basically Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, distilled to five paragraphs. Very nice.

Which perhaps says something about the book.

The ride is often more enjoyable than the destination. I'm not talking specifically about Outliers but in general, I think the essence of any good book could probably be distilled down to a paragraph.

The essence perhaps, but rarely the entire template.

10k hours - the amount of time proposed that it takes to master a craft.

How do you define mastery of a craft?

Jobs e.g. certainly had put in >10k in developing and selling electronic devices when he founded NeXT. But I'd argue it took him a couple more years to become as good and successful as he is now. Another example is Johann Sebastian Bach. Many think, that his last work was his best.

Mastery is a strange term. For example, most people would recognize that to be a professional athlete you must have mastered that sport. Yet, at the same time, within that professional level there are often a select few all-stars or champions that stand out amongst the field.

So, Steve Jobs in charge during the Mac era vs Steve Jobs as CEO of Pixar vs Steve Jobs CEO of Next vs. Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple during the iMac/iPod/iPhone era is certainly different levels of mastery. At what point did Steve Jobs "master" the art of running a company? You can certainly look back a decade or more and see him doing much the same things then as he is now. Yet, he clearly is a more successful CEO now than 10 or 20 years ago.

Perhaps mastery would be better defined as attaining a level of capability in all the required skills required of a particular job/skillset. Mastery is often the point of diminishing returns where you spend minimal time learning new skills and most of your time refining your skills and methods further.

    Yet, he clearly is a more successful CEO now 
    than 10 or 20 years ago

That's mostly because success is a strange beast with many variables, including luck and timing. If he's more successful than 10-20 years ago, that doesn't mean that 20 years ago he wasn't more capable than he is now.

Also, if you measure success by how much money he makes, then Pixar was his biggest success, an investment that started in 1986 and ended in 2006 - paying serious dividends as Jobs became a major stockholder of Disney.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com