Successful people are successful

Instead of growth, I think you should have use the idea of investment. One chooses how you to spend his time, and that may be in learning new tools, creating a product, or non-work related things.

Self-sacrifice is the key to producing strong personal relationships, and not something that should be rejected based on a faulty association with time spent in business. Whether one works for himself or another, it is not self-sacrifice; rather, it is toward the reward. Self-sacrifice for personal reward is no longer self-sacrifice.

Success in business or wealth (which seems to be your focus) may be completely unrelated to other people's definitions of success. One may choose not to invest his time toward monetary success because he defines success not by becoming rich but by enjoying strong relationships with his family. Note that I am not saying that one cannot be "successful" at both, but there are many who have become wealthy to the detriment of everything I would consider success. To me they are wealthy or well-known, but truly failures.

Acting for the benefit of others does not have to be to one's own detriment, and relationships without self-sacrifice are ultimately doomed.

Swombat casually mentioned that success might be a lifelong habit - in her case it seems that UNsuccess can also be a habit. Whenever a decision comes along, she decides for what's good for others. I recently heard she might even put off her baby plans for one year just because her pupils asked her to stay with them until school leaving exam. She also hates money, and starts inviting people for dinner (who earn a lot more than her) whenever she got some € to spare. Every week she's having a fever because she sleeps only 2-3 hours a day so she can spend more time with working for her students (from whom she can't take much money, because they are, well, students).

I really like her - almost everybody does. Such sacrificing personalities are well thought-of in our society. Many people admire her for her ability to work 15h a day, while earning almost nothing. But it's a life I would never want to lead.

Recently, her life has finally improved, and she has been forced to earn more so her husband is allowed to move to Austria. Still, she now has 3-4 jobs at a time, hustling around so she earns < half of what I make by working 20-30h per week.

I have a problem with this statement. I think of all the people that have put in hard, boring work so that you can write that blog on an open-source powered internet, so that I can type this response on my unix powered mac, so that we can go to Wikipedia and gain knowledge only the exceedingly wealthy could have had 200 years ago.

Other than that, I'm really at a loss for words.

EDIT: seriously, am I missing something? Even when that one guy was trying to talk about how some child prodigy who had died wasn't very smart, and pg talked about how embarassed he was for hackernes, I don't know if I've ever seen something I disagree with so profoundly. Did the author only mean 'make those choices some of the time'? It seems to me that the natural conclusion to that statement is pretty disgusting.

You can also educate others ("sacrifice" your knowledge) while also increasing your success score. In fact, most of the people I really respect on Twitter, for example - many of which I've never met - I respect because they've taught me something. And almost all of them are financially successful.

I say, as I've been saying for years, that they should just think of something they want to build, and try to figure it out. And then I add this:

It doesn't matter if you succeed or fail. Programming is constant failure. You try something and it doesn't work. You try again and it doesn't work. You might try 50 different things before you find the one that works.

And while success might matter when you're on the job, it doesn't matter when you're learning. Because you learn exactly as much from your failures as your successes. When you figure out that Rails won't work for your streaming media server because it can't hold enough connections open, after investing weeks of investment.... great! You learned a thousand important lessons.

If you had succeeded, because you randomly chose Node.js at the start, you would've actually only learned 999 important lessons.

Which isn't to say that I disagree with the OP... often success does compound. But learning to program, at the very least, is an area where it's just Attempt--not Success or Failure-- that compounds.

First, much in our lives is governed by pure chance. I can't quantify exactly how much, but it's a lot. It's true that here in the West, we've managed to eliminate many forms of sudden destruction that were quite common in pre-modern life (and are quite common today in less developed countries), and when disaster strikes we have mechanisms for mitigating its effects like insurance and medicine. All this has led the Western man to believe that if he picks his priorities just so and organizes his life just right, he has a good chance of achieving any goal he sets out to achieve. This is, well, to put it simply - not true. Not only is this not true, but believing it is dangerous for two reasons: The first is that if in spite of everything you do not "succeed" you may come to believe this is the result of some personal failing; this may be, but it certainly not necessarily so. The other is that when others do not attain success you may come to believe that this is the result of some personal failing on their part - like laziness, and, again, this ain't necessarily so. Especially in America, where social mobility is so rare compared to other modern countries (though it's better than in underdeveloped nations), many failings are simply due to the environment a child was born into. But even if you're born to the right parents, disaster, and fortune will strike you at random.

My problem with the second premise, that we should even aspire to optimize our lives, is more one of a personal preference. One of my favorite books is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground". The book's protagonist has this to say:

"Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything."

"For man's everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe."

He rebels against intentionality. He balks at modern attempts to optimize life. He insists on his right to do things out of sheer spite. He want do do things that go against any common or uncommon sense. He sometimes wants to inflict pain upon himself, to wallow in the ensuing misery, and enjoy it. And though he is far from a man anyone would want to end-up like, he is a free spirit who chooses to be a slave only to his own neuroticism rather than to anyone else's utilitarian logic.

My perspective is different:

Sacrifice yourself for life. Go all in! Not for yourself, your masters, or your peers, but for life itself. This isn't about success. This is about living to your fullest potential and consistently reaching a state of flow in which you are able to fully appreciate all facets of your journey, not just its end.

edit; I'm being down-voted but I did not write a content-less post. I simply disagree with the author. He is trying to optimise for success and by implication happiness, but has not considered hedonistic adaption [0] and flow states [1]. I believe his optimisations will not be fruitful long-term.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Focus on self-sacrifice could be described as an intrinsically motivated activity to optimize for personal growth in realizing the ideal of benefitting others. For me, these intrinsic cycles have been self-benefitting - a focus on a particular product, or a focus on growth of engineering skills. In both cases, relationships suffer, bank accounts dip - but at the end of the cycle I have a more evolved product or a much stronger set of engineering skills.

Extrinsic motivation will optimize for a different set of success criteria. Maybe growing skills not as important at this phase, but perhaps growth in relationships, self-promotion and financial gains are the better opportunity to grow.

Yes, growth is the basis of success, but interest is only part of the magic - perhaps more important is arbitraging the value created as you switch between these 2 contexts of motivation.

I highly recommend reading James Wallace's "Hard Drive" (http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/...) which provides some insight into Bill Gates. Regardless of your thoughts about the man, I think it is an extremely interesting read. The basic premise is that Gates is extremely competitive even on a minuscule scale, and it is due to that obsession & competitiveness he is where he is today.

I took my savings from my first job, went back to university to learn programming, then got a job with over double the salary. Now earn enough to save money (not that much, maybe a few thousand a year), and also learn a lot of new skills on the job (finance). I've avoided things that take up all my surplus cash/time... But I'm not sure how to 'reinvest' at this point. One obvious choice is doing a CFA (company pays the bills but it would be a huge timesink). Or I could try iOS or web development and use my money to get outside help where needed to make a good product. Or i could invest in stocks/bonds or something.

Anyone else care to share their history of, uh, reinvestment success?

However, once you cross certain thresholds of ability, optimization becomes a preferred solution. Networking starts to matter more. To build a desired connection you can "sacrifice for someone else." Once you have the connections, unique chances to work on ideas pass through you, and as we already know, ideas + opportunity are prerequisite to most forms of "success." Once you have that, the self-sacrifice process starts again, as now you have to prove that it can be done.

I've always followed a pay it forward even with people I've met for the first time and it has paid for itself time and time again. Watch how fast someone comes running when they hear you need a favor when they've received one from you...]

The other point I'd like to make is that I believe happiness and success go hand and hand. I know a lot more selfless happy people than selfish ones. Of course, success isn't one dimensional and if monetary measurements are the only indicator then....

Unless you have wealthy parents that is.

I've been thinking about this lately. It's really important to chose to spend time on things that are positive for you whether the primary aim or best case scenario pans out or not. Great post.

This is a very rational way of looking at things, much too rational to describe a "mind-set." From the point of view of most of our brain, the parts of our brain we've lived with our whole lives but still have a hard time communicating with, investing in yourself is self-sacrifice. You sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term pleasure. You even sacrifice short-term success for long-term success. The long-term success is off the radar of most of your brain, so you need a mindset that sees your "sacrifice" in a positive light.

For example, getting up early and knocking out an extra feature at work brings you immediate positive rewards. People notice it, and they notice you. That's relatively easy, a lower form of self-sacrifice. Staying up late studying linear algebra or a new concurrency paradigm doesn't bring you any immediate external rewards. (Sometimes you get the joy of understanding a major new idea, but more often it's just hard work.) It will bring rewards someday, but that pleasure is off your radar. You need a psychological connection between the pleasure you pass up today and a reward that is unspecified and even unimaginable because it is impossible to predict in any concrete detail.

One way of making that psychological connection is the concept of sacrifice, which often shows up as an important aspect of religious faith. Acting correctly now will bring rewards in the future: in the afterlife, in the next lifetime, or if you believe in the "Prosperity Gospel," next quarter. Christianity explicitly promotes sacrifice by setting up Jesus as the highest model for emulation, and by adopting the symbol of his sacrifice as the symbol of the religion itself.

I am not religious myself, but I think it is significant that we selfish, self-interested human beings are attracted to the power of sacrifice embodied in the story of Jesus(+). Perhaps it has something to do with the potential we see to better our own lives and the lives of the people we care about if only we had the discipline to sacrifice ourselves to what we value. Setting aside the moral question of whether it is appropriate to value our own well-being more highly than that of another person, it is painfully obvious that we value the well-being of ourselves today much more highly than the well-being of ourselves next year, or even next week. If our psychological concept of self and selfishness cannot extend to the person we will be next week, then perhaps it is in our long term self-interest to develop a mentality that helps us sacrifice ourselves to something that is (or merely seems) separate from us.

There are other ways to tackle the problem, but no single strategy will take us very far by itself. Cultivating a sense of intrinsic pleasure in the deferred-reward activities that we substitute for immediate-reward activities helps, but it can be overwhelmed by factors that affect mood, such as fatigue, problems in other areas of our lives, or simply having a bad day. Imagining the rewards can help, but sometimes the rewards are uncertain or unknowable. Pride can be a useful tool, but when we're tackling challenging work or something we aren't very good at, pride is sometimes best kept out of the picture. Sometimes stuff just sucks, and the only thing we can do is embrace the pain as evidence that we are following the right path.

Obviously there are pitfalls. You need to guide your sense of sacrifice so that it serves whatever you think is important. (Your children, your career, your guild, your six-pack abs, whatever.) Some people blindly sacrifice themselves for whoever walks by, hoping to find someone who returns the favor, so there's no arguing that a sense of self-sacrifice can express itself pathologically when it's poorly directed. Still, I think self-sacrifice is not just a morally beautiful idea, but a pragmatic way of pursuing your own interest as well.

(+) Religion is a worthwhile subject for HNers who are interested in "success literature" articles like this one. A common feature of all major religions is that there is an optimal way to live that brings the highest reward, but our morally or intellectually flawed selves naturally revolt from that path and seek lesser pleasures, which ultimately lead to disappointment or even punishment. Religion is the struggle to understand the higher path, detach ourselves from the compelling illusions that dominate our behavior, and attune ourselves to the highest source of good so we can follow it with conviction. Many articles on HN read the same way if you define success as the highest good.

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There are formulas for success and failure. Some people learn faster, some people learn slower; some lessons are better than others and get you there faster; some people are fortunate enough to be able to fail in more modest ways while they're simultaneously being successful in the grand scheme of things (Zuck). Sometimes randomosity bails you out of stupid choices, sometimes you hit the floor hard; the choice to learn or not is up to the individual either way.

Some people become successful early, and fail late. The list of former Forbes 400 members is littered with these people. Some people fail early, and succeed later, and for the rest of their lives, having learned their lesson.

In my experience, failure can feel a bit like living through a great depression. You become emotionally reflexive based on what you've learned / digested. Same way people learned to be extremely frugal after The great depression. If you learn the right lessons from it, your reflexes will keep you from making similar stupid mistakes later on. I don't know how you really learn those lessons without experiencing them (even if you do so in the 'fail small and often, while succeeding overall' manner).

Yep, it's a sucker's bet. You only get one shot at life, and you should be living it, not dreaming of the day when you can. And big things promised in the future have a funny way of not actually arriving.