What Should You Work On?
perell.com
perell.com
I find this a bit condescending.
Too many people act like entrepreneurship is something everyone has the stomach/personality/capacity for.
Too many people write blog articles about how if you're not building the next big thing, you're not contributing to society.
Most people I've met in my professional and personal life are supporting their families, trying to raise kids well, making time/$ for their passions, or just generally trying to live a decent life despite the difficult circumstances that life throws at you.
"People aren’t deliberate enough about choosing what to work on."
Hold up. What is this based on? Is it based on a feeling of the author's inflated sense of worth compared to others? Or is this really some objective and measurable metric?
Is it possible the author doesn't actually know or has taken the effort to deliberate on this statement themselves? Playing devil's advocate with your own ideas is probably the greatest service you can do for yourself but it seems that's not practised here. I can come up with many examples of how people ARE very deliberate in what they work on. Like you said, raising a family, enjoying time outside of work, just straight up trying to survive. These all seem pretty deliberate.
It’s a very HN mindset to reject articles not backed up by objective facts.
This is an inherently subjective post, pointing out the lack of hard data shouldn’t be an indictment of the author’s thesis.
In my opinion, a major facet of maturity is figuring out that all the negative shit you think about other people is often just the things you don't like about yourself projected onto other people.
Well, at least I do.
I'm about 33 and finally I feel secure enough to think about things beyond survival.
Depending on how someone’s life goes and the circumstances they were born into they may either start at this point or never get there at all.
The naïveté to different people’s situations is really prevalent here sometimes.
Why not build a society where everybody is building their own business, and we connect them all together? Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters?
Because most people are not capable of that, or they would not want to.
> Why does Google have to build their own browser? Why does Tesla have to build their own GPUs and Amazon their own datacenters?
Because only they have sufficient capital and expectation of return and intimate knowledge of the space to scratch their own itch.
Because most people are not capable of that
i find that extremely condescending. some may not want to, fine, but many also live in an environment where building your own business is being discouraged and made difficult. but for most, it is probably just that it takes more effort to build a business than to get a job.
how come that the countries with the most entrepreneurs are all in 2nd or 3rd world countries? uganda having the highest with 28% of the population having their own business.
i very much doubt that capacity has anything to do with it, only willingness and need. many people in uganda probably have their own business because they have no other alternatives. but still, the idea of a society where everyone is building their own business is totally possible. all it takes is the right attitude and willingness.
Some of us are not interested in having our own business, we just want to enjoy life in other ways such as raising a family, hobbies, relaxing, etc.
How do you achieve anything that requires multiple people to collaborate?
I find that it's very difficult to know, truly, what these mega corporations want. What does apple want? For everyone to use apple? Probably not, if this was the case they would be releasing much cheaper products.
So I think companies have a market segment they want to dominate, and of course there are some areas of conflict. Say, twitch is owned by Amazon and Google with YouTube also feels part of that space is owned to them. In this sense, they are no different to another form of social organisation we are fairly acquainted with: empires.
Now, why couldn't everyone just form their own society back in the day and live chill and not submit themselves to the rule of the empire? Well, the answer to that is that if the empire felt you belonged to them then they would simply swallow you.
So, to answer your question, people are building their own businesses but as soon as these become threatening in any way to the empires that rule these lands then these businesses are squashed. But that's exactly what is supposed to happen, if you can't take on the pressure then such is life.
I guess the sad news is that, even today, we still have empires ruling over us. But I would argue that quality of life, inequality, social liberties have all gotten better with every passing empire. What does the future of business look like? I'm not sure.
Otherwise, these come off as "your risk appetite and budget is too low try harder." The cost of failure is simply too damn high unless you're young and have zero responsibility and obligations or wealthy family/connections to fall back on [1].
(imho it is condescending on its own; treat the root cause, not the symptom, but that's hard and takes years to accomplish with little payoff to the person pontificating, so it's easier to complain on social/public media instead)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 (credit to u/notacoward)
It's only placing it in the context (first sentence) where it becomes condescending to me. Like, dude, you joking? Of course I'm thinking of what I'm doing with my life writing boring CRUD code. But it's lucrative.
exactly that. when i see a call for people to do more important work, this is the kind of stuff i think of. things that society actually needs.
Is it?
I moved from ML and Physics research to optimising the sale of imaginary currencies in mobile games, because the pay and stability is so much better.
It's a great shame that academia is terribly paid and an unstable career path in the West.
I'd much rather be working on Fusion research or genetic engineering, but that won't pay the mortgage.
Is it better in the East? No loaded question, I genuinely want to know your answer
Must be all that coal money
>Is it?
Yes, actually. It is.
Personally, I've been reading for 25 years about how "why are people wasting their time on $NICHE instead of contributing to $MAJORPROJECT" -specifically in the open source world. It becomes more and more grating and offensive every year.
If you have the ability to choose what you want to work on, then that is what you ought to work on. If you (generic "you") don't have a choice, then you have to do what you have to do and your limitations ought to not limit those who aren't limited or aren't in your situation.
There’s always a choice
People choose money, comfort or certainty all the time
I don’t think I’ve ever chosen a problem to solve professionally my whole life
And you know what? Given the choice, not sure what I’d pick
Given that you are in a developed country this may seem so of course...for most people they are just trying to survive
https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...
If I'd been overcome a compulsion to become a deadbeat when I was 20 years old and my professional career was erased from history, I don't think that reality would be worse than one in which my career existed, not even by the tiniest amount. My entire working life has basically been building nonsense to enable rich people to get even richer with less inconvenience.
It's frustrating because everyone knows it's pointless bullshit. I know it's pointless bullshit. My coworkers know it's pointless bullshit. My boss knows it's pointless bullshit. Everyone is just kinda going through the whole charade because it keeps the paychecks coming.
Entrepreneurship and making things do not need to be intrinsically linked. It's ok to work on things for the sake of making things. If you release yourself from the impulse of thinking you need to make cash from something, you can often feel more comfortable doing your best work on bigger, harder problems.
This, of course, doesn't work for everybody.
I think we can all agree that any book written about the Fall of Google is going to focus pretty strongly on their lack of a maintenance culture. Building bridges is great, but if the opening of the bridge was a major event for a town, the subsequent closure of said bridge will be an even bigger event.
When work is going smoothly, the story I'm working on this week is often of a lower priority than the one I worked on two months ago. The major exception being when the current story was blocked by dependencies. A lot of invention comes down to people noticing that ideas have been unblocked. But while the new gadget or surgery can have life altering effects, so can the collapse of infrastructure for food, water, and shelter. Those always need minders or society would unravel.
This is a fairly common take, but it is wrong in my opinion. I've worked on some fairly difficult engineering problems (related to signal processing) and one of the remarkable things is that multiple people in the room usually have a workable idea about how to approach it. And if you think about the really productive periods of science the number of scientists was very limited. There's no shortage of smart people who want to work on interesting problems.
What there is a shortage of are people with the organizational, and other, less tangible, skills that are needed to bring complex projects to fruition. At a high level, we know things that work for most of the list that Perell provided (energy, education, housing, healthcare, and transportation) and even assuming zero technological progress they could be hugely improved with existing technology, but someone has to figure out how to break the status quo and reach a new equilibrium.
Definitely those are important problems, but just being smart won't solve them. They already attract lots of smart people. You need to bring something else to the table to make progress.
I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, I think we have more capable people than ever before. The problem is that we deny almost everybody such opportunities. Companies are structured too hierarchically.
Want start-ups? Raise taxes on the wealthiest of us, increase social services and safety nets and access to education. If people feel safe, they'll take more risks. Make it so people don't have to risk their kids' futures on their idea.
Also maybe put some protections in place so massive incumbents can't just stomp potential competitors and squash innovation...
What do they thing is the number one reason most people won't start their own business?
That's obvious: the number one reason most people won't start their own business is that most new businesses fail. So most people won't try it, since they expect they will fail and don't want to go through trying and failing. Only people who are outliers, often extreme outliers, in their tolerance for failure or their belief that they are exceptional and won't fail (or most likely both) will try it.
It’s not “it’s hard and I might fail.” I only ever hear: I have loved ones whose health, education, and financial security I can’t put at risk.
This problem exists even if you have complete certainty you’ll succeed, because en route to that certain success, your loved ones are still at immense risk.
"i can't put my family at risk" is exactly the same as "i might fail"
I might fail to get a hole-in-one at mini golf, but the stakes of trying are pretty much zero.
Anyone who either has no dependents or comes from enough money that it doesn’t matter can’t begin to relate to this.
Even then, I imagine there's a lot of countries in the world where running out of money would mean landing in a safety net that still involves relocating to the the most basic accommodation available that may be neither safe nor close to any friends and/or family.
also most european cities generally do not have unsafe neighborhoods. that's really an american thing. (and in third world countries who don't have such a safety net anyways)
this needs verification, but i speculate that those countries that actually have a safety net are doing this right, and other countries don't do much at all.
If it takes you 5 years to hit your guaranteed $100MM payout, and en route your spouse got hit by a car while you had no insurance and your child had to skip vital years of college because you had no paycheck, then it doesn't actually matter that the $100MM payout came exactly when it was guaranteed to come.
My NUMBER ONE CONCERN, and the NUMBER ONE CONCERN for most of the prospective hires I have talked to is healthcare. This has been the experience and NUMBER ONE CONCERN for every other person I know who has started a company, and I know a lot of those people since the experience drives you to know other founders.
You are completely out of touch if you think the the primary issue is that startups fail. Founders as a group are kind of delusional since believing you can beat incumbents, a mostly irrational proposition, selects for that.
A friend recently interviewed at a pretty well funded company started by some ex-bigco executives. It has raised a lot of money and has a pretty substantial team. They are, as far as I can tell, not far from product (trials now) and yet friend, who they really actively recruited, as part of his offer, was told he'd have to buy his own insurance using ACA.
(a) this was very surprising in legal terms, and I still don't quite get it, but (b) the friend absolutely rejected the offer even though he was otherwise very interested. His issue was that he can compromise on comp, he can compromise on location, and so on, but no way in hell was he going to compromise on health insurance. That take is regardless of whether he would, in fact, be compromising.
In my state, there are zero individual plans offered outside the exchange—you call insurers, you call brokers, they'll all tell you the same thing, that every company is completely out of the individual market here unless they're on the exchange—and most years only two providers offer ACA plans, and 100% of those plans have terrible "networks" (which hospitals/doctors/pharmacies/urgent-cares/testing-facilities accept the insurance, for non-US readers).
It's literally impossible to buy an actually-good individual plan in my state. Even middling employer-offered insurance is usually overall-better than the "platinum" ACA plans. I mean, I assume the very-rich have some concierge-type options that are good, but for normal people, having to buy individual insurance here means definitely having bad insurance, even if you pay a ton.
I am in CA and I find the plans offered quite OK. They're better than what I've gotten from some employers though much, much worse than what I had most recently. The friend above was in Massachusetts where, I assume, things would be OK, but I didn't check.
Which means you are not even in the demographic I was referring to. The relevant demographic is people who have not started a business. If those people's primary concern was health care, then, as others have pointed out elsewhere in the comments on this article, in countries that don't have health care coupled to employment, more people would start businesses; but that isn't the case.
Starting a business is hard and confusing and frustrating in countless ways that a person can simply avoid by taking a salaried position.
[1] https://www.gemconsortium.org/news/Europe%E2%80%99s%20hidden...
I'm not sure why, perhaps its the egalitarian nature means no one wants to be richer than anyone else? Or maybe its lack of desperate workers.
If there is a correlation, I'm guessing it is that governments that take active responsibility for the wellbeing of their citizens also institute regulations which may make starting businesses more difficult. In other words, active governments are more active in general, not just limited to the safety net.
It's also very hard to generalise across Europe, which has a more diverse set of rules and business cultures than the US does.
But given a magic wand to make changes I would definitely introduce "de minimis" clauses in a whole load of business regulations. The rules for megacorps can afford to be complicated, the rules for small businesses cannot.
Many countries have done this — do you have any examples of one of them becoming more entrepreneurial? Because I don’t think we can just assume it to be true.
Just because people said that was their biggest barrier to starting a business doesn’t make it true. And I say that as someone who generally supports universal healthcare/insurance. People make up tons of reasons for not making a huge change in their life (like founding a company): “if only X then I’d finally do Y”. But if you fix X, they’ll find some new reason that they can’t do it.
Also needed is a consistent explanation that explains all the other countries doing this which have nonetheless failed to become more entrepreneurial.
Over the last decade, an incredible sum of money has been poured into the homelessness problem. We now have the homeless industrial complex, which feeds the very problem it was supposed to solve. It requires perpetual homelessness in the same way that the military industrial complex requires perpetual war. As a result, we have more homelessness, not less!
Or examine the student loan crisis. Because the government guarantees the loans, loans are made without consideration for whether students will ever be able to repay them. There is no cost benefit analysis or return on investment. It's just take the loan and maybe get a degree, any degree. In addition, the government made it impossible to discharge these loans in bankruptcy. In effect it's a wealth transfer program to college administrators and a big fuck you to taxpayers and vulnerable students. All under the guise of helping people.
Which has been the case for at least the last decade when you examine the data and the on ground reality of the situation. All I'm pointing out is that you must repair the government first so it's actually solving problems and not making them worse.
https://www.econotimes.com/UBI-Helps-People-Be-More-Producti...
"Universal Basic Income does not Reduce Worker Productivity, Study Finds"
https://www.technology.org/2021/01/19/universal-basic-income...
Doesn't it strike you as odd then, that US is unique among first-world countries at (1) not having a safety net like universal healthcare and (2) being by far, almost the most entrepreneurial country in the world? (May be behind Israel and/or Singapore, but it's a whole other topic anyway).
I mean, if your assumption was right, then European countries like France or Germany would be homes of Silicon Valley, but it's the other way around.
No.
Conditions were right to get us to here. Changing conditions slightly can get us past here.
No one is claiming we should be just like strawman country FOO, which is business-hostile.
What seems to empirically be true is that easy access to capital is the primary driver for entrepreneurship, and easy access to capital is mostly enabled by a combination of fiscal policy and wealthy individuals and institutions without better investment opportunities. Easy access to capital is the primary driving force behind entrepreneurship in the West, and particularly in the US, and it seems being the wealthiest country in the world is a huge driver on its own for this.
Surely, by the sheer monetary volume, the fiscal policy component you mention will overshadow any private initiative, and it is this component which makes the US an outstanding location?
If this is true, progressive tax system wouldn't interfere with the entrepreneurship much, while the QE-driven investment continues to work as intended.
To be sure, my critique is mostly directed at form and tact. It is one thing to say: "we have really stagnated on energy, education, housing, healthcare, and transportation and need to double down on it. How can we incentivize more people to focus on these problems?" and quite another to say "Most people are working on trivial matters and/or pretending to be busy."
Well, my top priority at that age was not to be poor. The optimal strategy was to work in the boring parts of IT and hopping to a better job whenever an opportunity arose. (This worked for me, thank you)
So, sorry but the deal where I work on some crazy idea and become poor if it fails was just unattractive to me (and probably isn't to a lot of people who are not born rich).
There's a weird case of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs where the bubble you live in during college has a lot of people worried about self actualization because their support group (or loans) is helping take care of things like food and shelter. Historically, the moment you graduated you were responsible for all of that stuff, but that's been blurred by people moving back in with their parents. I don't know if that's enough to change the equation but certainly for a lot of previous generations we were trying to get our own oxygen masks in place before helping others.
The problem is that your ideals become immediately in conflict with logistics and you end up having to compromise. Even mentorship is fraught because mentors are human and some of their non-negotiables may be wrong. If you refuse you may be entirely on your own. All of a sudden you're 30 and the asshole in the mirror is someone you hardly recognize. That's probably a better demographic to target for such things, both because they're more interested and they have practical knowledge that increases the likelihood of your efforts to be described as "effective" instead of the dreaded, "well-meaning".
Starting a business is hard; find an unsolved problem and then work your ass off until it’s solved and the solution can be marketed. It takes a certain type of person to be able to succeed in this endeavor, while the rest are going to be better off in their cushy office job where they can have something of a work-life balance.
It takes a lot of money and experience to build something meaningful in the industries the author mentioned. Healthcare, energy, housing, education, and transportation. It must take a lot of insider knowledge to be able to identify the unsolved problems in these industries. A Harvard MBA won’t know how to fix the healthcare industry, but I bet a nurse that’s working 60 hours this week has some ideas. The former might have the connections and capital to build the change but they lack the experience and motivation, while the latter could have the solution, but lacks the connections, time, and money to build the solution.
Of course they are not all business starters or entrepreneurs. The things society and competition, and law put you through when starting a business could well mean, that these people would never even consider starting a business, because it would take away way too much of their time, which they spend on working on the fringes of human knowledge. They simply don't have the time for such mundane things.
The fact that it’s hard to succeed and less rewarding in incumbent industries tells you where the real challenges are, and where the best of us are most needed. Escaping to startupland is dodging your reponsibility to give back. It’s taking the easy way out.
If you work for a big company you could potentially work on exciting stuff. In my experience the smaller places tend to be risk averse or they just can't afford the bleeding edge stuff. So you'll often be stuck fixing obscure bugs introduced by former employees and dealing with bad infra decisions.
Yes, David, please teach me how to write great OC that Arianna Huffingon can steal.
These fields need zealous reformers and activists with the time and money to push through mountains of entrenched interests, complacency, and politics. The work sucks, and people capable of doing it will always be in short supply.
Find out what sustains your passions and figure out how to contribute that in a pro-social, community focused way
Does it need to be full time? No!
It is in the spirit of the article and a good follow-up for people (like me) who might be looking for a career change to something a more positively impactful and less detrimental.
This aged incredibly badly.
Actually this talk is on the topic of the title of this blog post. The blog post itself seems mainly a complaint about current circumstances.
It's quite rare to find the two in a single person and very often the best on one side are the worse on the other.
I'm just as guilty as anyone. I've been sold the lie that because I'm a programmer, I'm soon to be rich. I just have to work a little harder. When I'm not working for a paycheck, that time is supposed to be for me to be working towards my dreams and striking it rich and making the world a better place.
Don't fall for it. It's okay if you need to spend that third of your day not spent sleeping or working for the man to recover.
Whoa there tiger. Maybe some people do, but there’s plenty of people who simple never, ever want to work for politicians. Why on earth would I want to work for those lamentable grifters? Most of them are not solving anything.
Even when it works it fails. Any attempt at long-termism leads to short-term pain that opens up a weakness that the opposing party uses to grab power and undo it.
And why should it work? With an electorate that skews towards retirement age the system is delivering exactly the result one would expect - enriching retirees at the expense of future generations. For my generation: no housing, no healthcare, no pension, no climate. For retirees: no taxes.
It feels like we need a fundamental change to enfranchisement. Perhaps parents should be able to cast votes for their children?
Retirees also have nothing better to do than sit around watching and reading conservative propaganda which is close to impossible to compete with.
And it’s a moot point because if you figure out the magic formula for getting this huge turnout then the same approach will be used by your opponents and the largest demographic will still win, and that’s not young people.