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Comment by pkdpic | Hacker News Reader

I'm usually very wary of this kind of post, narrative building and all that, but I like this. And I feel like the honesty at the end of the authors success / path leaves room for the reader to put it all in context.

> If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future.

> Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool.

> Next, find events where the people you want to work with are.

> Then get a drink into you (or don't) and talk to them about it.

I might add a Henry Rollins quote at the end of "(then) say yes to everything but make it work for you."

Then maybe one final step of, get super lucky and keep trying until you cant anymore.

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> Then maybe one final step of, get super lucky and keep trying until you cant anymore.

I think one of the keys here is that you can manufacture a certain amount of luck. Perhaps you've heard of the micromort[0] a fascinating statistical tool many countries use to determine how they spend money in healthcare. The general idea is to measure all activities in their chance to add/remove the probability of death even by very tiny amounts, this is applicable to luck.

When you go to a some event that's a networking opportunity, chances are nothing will come of it. You might go to a dozen with no good outcome but your lifetime chances of a good outcome go up once you decide to try to network, it's conceptually useful to think of these events as giving you a few points of "microluck", attending while following the author's advice even more.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

The concept that made this click for me is increasing your “luck surface area”.

Unfortunately I don’t remember who to attribute it to.

Cory House from Outlier Developer. Great course on Pluralsite.

I'm a marine biologist, often when we fish it is in some difficult circumstances due to species or habitat of interest. A quote passed down from one of my academic great grandparents (that was probably in a discussion about the futility of it all) is that you definitely aren't going to catch any fucking fish if you aren't fishing.

Making (software) stuff seems easy. I do post about it on social media, but honestly it gets 0 traction since I have almost no audience.

> If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some.

This seems like "rest of the owl" where it leaves out a ton of critical steps. Become good at marketing is a lucrative career if you are good at it. So excuse me for being jaded when "learn marketing" seems as helpful to me as "sell profitable services". Sure, but how?

The post recommends Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and Code Academy. Only Wikipedia has info on marketing, but reading it is not the same as learning how to do marketing.

The filter is the skill of self-directed learning. It is a meta skill that can be built, which then increase opportunities dramatically.

When I see the jib "they skipped a bunch of steps", it tells me that the person who received the advice needs to work on creating their personal learning system. Ideally, you feed your system a topic or idea, and it walks you through the exploration and work of understanding and applying that knowledge. It's not necessarily a piece of software. It can be a checklist, a journal, doodling on whitebords, blogging, whatever. Ultimately, all human knowledge is accessible through language. Whether that is true or not, if you act from that frame, there's nothing you can't learn with the right support and systems in place.

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