On quitting, failing, and, “I find a lot of people who should quit don't” | Hacker News Reader

On quitting, failing, and, “I find a lot of people who should quit don't”

herbertlui.net

35 pointsherbertl17 comments

Derek Sivers had a good comment on this recently on a podcast (I can't remember which, perhaps Tim Ferris).

Derek was describing Trent Resnor of Nine Inch Nails who, as a musician, played in multiple bands of different styles. Rock, Jazz, Industrial, Dance, etc.

After some time, Nine Inch Nails (Industrial genre according to Sivers), was the one that got the most attention, and so Resnor focused on that one.

This is somewhat similar to starting a start-up. Don't get married to your idea, or potentially even market. Make a few small bets if you can, and see what people are attracted to, and then put more effort into that.

Resnor "quit" the bands that weren't successful, and put the effort into the one that had the best opportunity.

I see variations of this advice a lot, and I think it depends on what you want to do. If your goal is, e.g. to get VC funding then there is a pathway to increasing your odds that has a component of focusing on what sticks.

If your goals are different (and I'd argue more principled) then you may not want to just capitulate and try and optimzie for a known audience or market. This probably has a lower change of success, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. To use the startup founder example, if all you're doing is optimizing for VC funding and putting your own vision and ambitions on the back seat, you could also just consider getting a job.

Also, average strategy generates average rewards. The path people choose really depends on their risk tolerance. I don't think it's right to say one is better than another.

Trent Resnor is an interesting example. If his strategy was as you described, I'd be very curious to know what his motivation was - I'd guess it's more complex than just wanting to be in a successful band. I kind of wish I could visit an alternate universe where his dance music career was the one that took off

I like your point, however, I also think that when we're discussing these options, we're likely focusing on spreading yourself in a domain where you have interest.

Let's take the example of a friend of mine who is a stone mason. He started out doing all kinds of different stone works. From driveways, stone walls, fireplaces, etc etc.

Any job that needed doing, he could do.

But then he did a bathroom which ended up in a bunch of architecture magazines, and that led to another bathroom, which led to a spa.

He now only does high-end bathrooms and spas. That's what the market told him they valued.

He still works in stone, just like Trent works in music. Still loves the craft. If the market had said "we love the walls you make", he probably would have focused on that.

This is so cool! I had no idea, thanks for sharing.

On the journey to find the primary source (https://sive.rs/2008-08-tim-ferriss), I came across this fact that Reznor started NIN in 1998 and was the only permanent member of NIN until 2016.

Projects like the Foo Fighters (Dave Grohl), Bon Iver (Justin Vernon), and Tame Impala (Kevin Parker), all started as one person bands, too! (I write more about one-person restaurants, one-person plays, etc., here: https://herbertlui.net/the-simple-truth-behind-successful-cr...)

It reminds me of Diagram is doing (https://diagram.com/) with Magician, Genius, Prototyper, etc.

This reminds me of college, I remember when when I was in my freshman year and I had many classmates who had failed Real Analysis and Linear Algebra, now while it was fine in my opinion to fail two courses that are considered hard for someone new to college, the next year I had realized they had also failed all the courses for the first year.

While I don't think they should have dropped out right away, however if I were in their place, I would have certainly dropped out but maybe that's just me.

When I was teaching, there were often a few students who rarely showed up to class, didn't turn in much homework, and when they did, it was only the first few questions. One such student asked me for a huge favor: erase his record for the semester and grade him purely on the final. I kinda stared at him for a minute, and asked him why I should do that. He said something about everybody deserving a second chance. I ultimately made a deal with him, because I wanted him to be motivated to try. He didn't show up to the final.

The thing about math and science is that you need to show up, you need to put effort in, you need to keep trying until you get the correct answer. And then you need to keep doing that. In my experience, nobody keeps trying if they think they can't do it. I have come to believe that pretty much everybody is capable of doing the calculations. But not everybody is willing to subject themselves to the grindstone.

I've seen novelists, songwriters, musicians, painters, etc say the same. The lesson I take from this is not that people need to learn when to quit, they need to learn to stop half-assing it with the expectation that things will eventually get easy.

Yours is a good point, but I can't leave this without comment. The sociological structure in which the actions are taken matter too. This student might have been fine in another educational structure (such as an apprenticeship, or however it was people learned in paleo- and neolithic times).

After dropping out a couple of times I found college was a lot easier as an adult. Not because I had grown, I don't think. But possibly because I had learned elsewhere, which made the courses easier, and definitely because I stopped caring as much.

I dropped out of college and returned as an adult as well. It wasn't until I took life seriously, and saw math as a necessary skill to achieve my goals, that I became willing to put the effort in.

I agree with the sentiment but would amend to say that it is evident to and articulable by to those with a certain taste. Not everyone can tell and not everyone who can tell can explain it to young people in a way that affects them.

Often it’s someone who has learned some painful lessons in the process of mastering their medium and learning to navigate the associated commercial reality.

Wow I’m honored you were provoked by my comment and wrote such a thoughtful response!

Thank you for the original comments. They were well-written and punchy, and definitely prompted some introspection.

I was considering posting to the original thread, and sensitive to it looking too self-promotional. I'm glad you saw this, it'd be great to hear if you had anything to add.

So in other words if your creative effort is so narrow that your work never shines, you might not be creating "art" after all.

Makes perfect sense to me. The process reveals the motives.

Vincent Van Gogh's work never shined while he was alive.

It did though. His sister-in-law successfully promoted it after his death, and it was therapeutic for him while he was alive. As the article puts it, without the paintings he would have suffered more.

Contrast that with how much more common it is for people to suffer for their art because of their pretensions.

Precisely. It depends on how you define "success".

Oops, that wasn't entirely what I was intending to communicate! (art vs. Art is a big topic—who/what defines what is acceptable as art, etc.? Duchamp's Fountain comes to mind)

Perhaps I'd suggest it's your effort to make the work shine, not just in the actual creation of the work, but in the contextualization of it as well. (This is connected to your point on narrowness—if your vision is narrow, you can't contextualize.)

The most literal example that comes to mind is Virgil Abloh feeling the need to prove what he was making was art, and relying on his research and the work of his inspirations as evidence or "proofs." He discusses further here: https://youtu.be/zKYp1t0-xYw?t=1313

And what of those whose art isn't appreciated until after their death? Should they have quit? Van Gogh comes to mind.

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