Paint Drip People
tidyfirst.substack.com
tidyfirst.substack.com
CURIOSITY seems to be the horizontal line; i.e. the person's latent curiosity about things, domains, areas, etc, and the urge to explore/discover is what drives the horizontal movement.
The 'amount of paint' variable, which is clearly the most important part of the physical reality underpinning the metaphor, would perhaps be akin to COMPETENCE. Competence is a stand-in word for intelligence, grit, suitable background knowledge, and probably a host of other qualities.
So what's the grand conclusion here? That highly curious and highly competent people tend to be prolific in their output?
Not so surprising perhaps, but fun to think about.
Maybe there's some sweet spot, where founders have enough real-world experience to understand how the world works, and how to build things, but are still curious and driven enough to jump off and try.
Past that point, I fear that curiosity starts declining even as competence increases - say, when you're 50, will you get the feeling you 'know' the world in-and-out, you 'know' there's no easy opportunities... and besides, you have a teenager-filled family, a mortgage, etc all of which perhaps stifle really broad-ranging curiosity not least because your time has more demands on it.
(In the US, a super HR person's Spidey Sense would tingle, and they'd fly across the building and yank the keyboard out of someone's hands, before certain sentences could be finished. Then sit down for a constructive discussion about why generalizations are not only counterproductive and unfair, but also a big policy no-no at most established US companies. But on HN, we just have to frequently ask to please stop saying that.)
Lots of successful startups could have a post-hoc analysis of "Holy shit we were stupid, but we worked hard and got lucky"
Or, as a friend of mine put it, inexperienced people don't succeed because they know something that experienced people do, they succeed because they don't know something that experienced people do.
But I definitely acquired some skills in similar method, just doing something, hitting a snag and exploring some niche of debugging or code to get that tiny speck of knowledge while otherwise not knowing all that much about adjacent subjects.
The same, pretty much. I moved into architecture and having such broad knowledge really helps with being able to talk to pretty much anyone.
I like this. Sounds like one can have multiple drips going at once, including some that hve been dripping for a long time.
> Eventually the last drip stops and a new one starts.
Is this sentence saying that at some point the multiple ongoing drips might stop (or slow to a crawl), but the person is still learning, because they're already starting new drips?
I'd prefer to avoid misinterpretations of short-attention-span or serial-dabbler.
Also, the characterization of T-shaped here speaks of interests, but the motivations for skill development might actually be necessities, such as in an early startup. The interest can be a side-effect of something needing doing. You start to dig into the solution domain, anchored around a real problem, and it becomes interesting.
If only we could be comb-shaped.
The deep dives are driven by curiosity rather than by projects necessarily.
I guess the classical example of this is the renaissance man, but that at least required different fields like art and science and not different kinds of programming.
Then a few years later, I find another super successful burrito restaurant. They make it completely opposite to what I wrote in my book.
It turns out the reasons for success runs deeper than the superficial things that you see people do day to day.
For every successful person that reads a book a week, there’s probably 5 that just laze on the couch.
I understand that not every successful person reads a book a week (or s/a book a week/any other "productive" habit often bandied about in articles like this), but I really doubt that very many successful people habitually laze on the couch.
Or, for every "paint drip person", you might find another person who is equally as successful and devoted their entire energy to a single project or idea.
So actually a full-stack developer, according to the person who coined the term, is not just someone who can do backend and front-end, but you need to have the design (and business) chops too.
It’s deep cuts like this that make hn worth the read. Cheers!
Put any of this stuff into practice and you run into practical issues, and it's way less interesting.
I'm definitely a paint drip dude and it's not at all useful. In the absence of a team of cultists to do my bidding, any paint drip that stops is then useless to go further, and the metaphor breaks down. It becomes 'abstractly looking at a pile of uncompleted projects', and even when my job is coming up with stuff of that nature, I have to finish the stuff for it to matter, even to me.
Don't be a drip: 'real artists ship' :)
Both spent about two decades living in near poverty and only recently experienced financial success.
I don’t believe telling either of them to switch strategies would have been helpful.
We could infer from these two cases that “don’t give up” is the unifying factor, and that that’s helpful advice. I think history is littered with counter examples. Giving up may not be psychologically healthy (or advisable), but advising somebody “don’t give up” can still be cruel and unhelpful. Resisting the urge to give advice may be kindest.
I suspect most advice broadcast on the internet does more to inflate the author’s reputation than to help the audience. Even if this is true, it doesn’t rule out the possibility of a small quantity of exceptional advice having an outsized positive impact that outweighs the over abundance of reputation inflating advice.
It's not that useful of an observation because you must then ask what you're going to do about it, but it is a valid observation all the same. This mode of being does exist. My career's based on being that, and also putting in the effort to finish things: otherwise it would be pure dilettantism.