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.
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.
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!
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.
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.