Make things

People who go their own way may well become leaders, simply because to go your own way you have to be decisive, and most people are indecisive, and in times of uncertainty they will look to people who are decisive to take the lead.

But that doesn't mean that the qualities listed are leadership qualities. I'd say that the ability to understand and empathise with people, to figure out what they want, the ability to motivate others to do their best, the ability to communicate convincingly, and the ability to make decisions under pressure - all those are way more important than the ones listed in the quote.

Of the list of leadership qualities:

> courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly

I'd argue that only the last one is really a requirement for leadership. All the others make for a better leader, but they are not requirements.

When I started playing with computers in elementary and middle school, it helped me put aside some of the trivial things that were important to my peer group at the time, like wearing the right brands or being seen with the right people. Technology was about making a better world, sharpening useful skills, and attacking hard problems that used to be impossible to solve.

The connection between people that technology has brought over the last couple decades is awesome for a great many reasons. I doubt I need to defend that point.

The biggest downside though, for me, is the invasion of the messiness of the social world into the idealism of the tech world. It bothers me when I go to an event that is ostensibly a "hackathon" or some similarly maker-oriented affair, and the mood is not unlike high school, or hollywood, or a nightclub. Many of the people there are paying acute attention to signals of status from others, and working on sending the right signals of status themselves.

It is my impression that motivations like elevating one's social status, and fear of missing out, are the primary things bringing most people into the world of technology today.

Improving the world, solving hard problems, and making things seem to be lower on the list. I'm sure communities focusing on these things are still thriving, but they seem to be getting harder to find, because the status seekers can be pretty good at adopting the lingo of the idealists.

If you aren't leading people, you aren't a leader. It's right in the name. If you're going your own direction, alone, you're a pioneer. But not a leader.

I look at what people had created and in between the thoughts of "this is cool", "this is boring", and "why didn't anyone think of this before?", there's a sense of inspiration that someone has created something and people are using it now. (I also get something similar to NIH, but I've learned through the years to mostly ignore that.)

I get a lot of joy in using software to allow people to do something new, something better than they had done before, or just to make their everyday life a little bit easier.

http://caterina.net/wp-archives/98#comment-7988

I can only comment from my experiences in Berlin,Germany but what I ve found here that many people here read books / watch movies of “How to…. ” or someone’ story to sucess and use it as a carbon copy of how to suceed.

I think people like to hide behind big names, like if you criticse them ” well Bill Gates did that” so like trying to use someone else mask to make you immune from critique. I think also this whole speech using figures and big names as well is a form of name dropping, its like ” im in their league / I m part of their crowd / take me serious” . To me it only shows who they want to be but who they are not at this very moment.

The shame is the “doing / creating ” aspect gets them to the state that they present themselves. So in this creatlve period, with no current exiting model template to follow, you need to strike out with something new, so if you are actually a new guy acting like you made it, well not much will happen.

As someone starting down the entrepreneurial path I have found that it's easy to get caught up reading the countless startup news sources, scouring endless books on how to succeed or attending the large number of conferences pitched at people like me. All have their merit in moderation but, particularly as someone who has decided to bootstrap my current startup, I find I get the most done and feel the best about what I'm doing when I focus on what my startup is building and how we're building it, rather than getting caught up in "all that noise".

In writing it down here it seems pretty obvious that focusing on what you're building should be the priority but it can be surprisingly easy to lose focus.

Just because lots more folks know about valuations and are connected does not mean that they are not building stuff.

This holier than thou post by Caterina actually just sounds like nostalgic rambling.

Let’s get excited and make things.

This line, from the perspective she delivers it, is almost criminal. Most of us are nerds and have no problem building stuff. We do have a problem making money off it so kudos if we are building a little less and figuring out more about how to make money by charging or flipping(Caterina should know about this?)