Success begets success: what are the basic heuristics of success? | Hacker News Reader

Success begets success: what are the basic heuristics of success?

15 pointsSMAAART12 comments

Is success really complicated as gurus, experts, and influencers want us to believe?

How can the wisdom of the HN crowd unpack the algorithm for success?

I'll start (Cunningham's Law):

- Set a directional goal, the vision.

- Start taking the first step.

- Improve 1% per day.

- Compare where you are today to where you were yesterday, that's the one and only measure.

- Expect failures and setbacks along the way.

- Celebrate showing up each and every day.

- Collect knowledge and friends along the way.

- Keep on going and don't stop.

The end: the process is the goal.

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It's hard to answer a question without your definition of success.

The USA has a much different idea of what "success" means given the consumerism and materialism.

While you are explaining principles of "successful people", many people follow these principles in their daily lives and aren't "successful" by definition, but are "successful" by their own definition.

This is vastly underrated. In places like HN, I think this is understood in terms of personal goals and accomplishments, sources of well being in life, but it applies to examples from the public sphere as well. It's become obvious that what one person values is really different from what another does when looking at things like voting for public representatives, for example, and certain kinds of success clearly didn't save some people from misery.

Now I remember why I left LinkedIn.

What kind of success? Why 1%, there are some things to achieve that have no fractions, like you don't start getting a brand new car by obtaining a wheel. You can try representing that with money, well you don't really know how much money (or even time) a successful innovation will cost because it's a random walk.

1% is, of course, a ridiculous number. You'd need scientific notation to express how wonderful you would be after 10 years, if you could do that.

To make it more tractable, 1% daily growth, means doubling in about 70 days.

1% _max_ per day might be a good rule of thumb to stop when you’re ahead. 1% _min_ per day would be a death march!

To your point, how can one measure 1% improvement in a meaningful way for abstract activities (e.g., learning)? The premise is that 1% improvement each day will yield large gains through the power of compounding, but if you aren’t sure you are making a quantified 1% improvement over your previous improved state things go awry quickly: if you only make 1% improvement over your original state each day then by the end of the year you have only improved by a factor of 4.65x, rather than your projected 37.8x improvement. Point being, if you want to take advantage of the sensitivity and power of exponential growth, you better be sure that you have a good way of quantifying your growth.

I know this is probably meant to be more inspirational than quantifiable, but then why even insert numbers unless to mislead people about the amount of effort it takes to improve? Either way you have to put in the same amount of effort to achieve the improvement, whether you break it up into 1% chunks or not there’s no free lunch.

- Always make a best effort to be sure your presentation is immaculate, from physical appearance, body language and attitude, to aspects of design, imagery, and symbolism, to spelling and grammar. Low-effort failures, like misspelling heuristics in the age of search engines and spellcheckers, don't look good at all.

Peak performance is how you get a job. When someone can only see a couple hours of you, that’s what they should get. You boost this with a large dose of coffee.

Average performance is how you ship high-quality products. It’s the set of things you do every day consistently. You boost this with good sleep, diet and excersize.

When I was younger I wanted to be successful. Now I try to enjoy every day with my family and friends and hope to be of some help to others.

"Big money isn't hard to come by. All it takes is a lifetime of devotion. But no ballerina ever works harder." --Robert Heinlein, A Stranger In A Strange Land.

1. Be wealthy and/or exceptionally skilled.

2. Get lucky.

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