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Comment by ttctciyf | Hacker News Reader

> The sooner you kill this beast within yourself, the sooner you can get to the real work of creating something that the market itself will validate

Highly anti-mimetic then, so long as you're committed to entrepreneuring and being validated by the market. Wait, what?

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To be fair there was an “–or not” at the end of that quote, and I assume that the dash was for emphasis. Not clear what was meant by it though

It is meant to hedge against anyone mistakenly interpreting the sentence as having any meaning.

well put! "hedge against" ... will incorporate that in my vocabulary

I read it as you need to stop consuming and start creating _something_ if you’re ever going to get noticed (we all need to be noticed, humans die when they are alone).

But creating something doesn’t guarantee you’ll succeed. A “You’ve got to be in it to have a chance at winning it” kind of message.

I interpreted the "-or not" to mean the market might not validate your hypothesis, which still has the same problem of emphasizing market success

> "the sooner you can get to the real work of creating something that the market itself will validate — or not."

I think the "or not" (that you've skipped) is crucial. In my reading, it emphasizes the irony that market validation might be just another flavor of social validation.

I read the paragraph as saying "the market is what you should want to validate you - or not (it might reject you) instead of the 'theater' of seeking publicity." It seems dreadfully sincere about "market validation" still being good while "publicity validation" is "bad." Despite "do something the market values" is basically foundational western capitalistic culture.

Look at the rest of the list too: It's all about being "socially" "counter-cultural" to pursue extremely traditional cultural things (market validated company! classic films! be grounded in the real! go analog! etc).

well, the context is within entrepreneurship: it's under "don't participate in Shark-Tankification of worth." basically dont be a wantrepreneur seeking vanity metrics.

i do agree the essay is very capitalist centric, but maybe that's the best point: society is tracking 1:1 with commercialism these days?

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