Doing vs Telling | Hacker News Reader

Doing vs Telling

sachagreif.com

87 pointsiSimone32 comments

Ah, self-promotion: a perennial HN topic. What I've seen is that there is a rift between the typical hacker and self-promotion.

As with most things, it's about balance, which Sacha hits upon. Success means that you need to self-promote, but at the right times with the right stuff to back it up. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to hackers/developers who are so vehemently against self-promotion to the point of blindness, and then, in the same breath, complain that other people who are less talented are getting too much attention by self-promoting.

I come from the school of thought that you need to be ultra-prepared and totally understand something and perfect it before even thinking about self-promotion. And, I assume, a lot of other hackers have this same mentality.

But, I realized that sometimes, you just need to ship and talk about what you're doing. It'll make you feel better, and also propel you to ship even more stuff. And in this way, self-promotion isn't only to tell other people that you're doing stuff, but it's also to get feedback and improve yourself. One cannot make great work in 100% isolation.

What a lot of hackers fail to realize is that by making something work and communicating to other people about it, you're already in the top percentile of people. It's OK to talk about it! Heck, it's also OK to promote it on HN and all the other usual channels. People will appreciate you sharing it. And the haters? Well, they'll always be there, even if you wait to perfect it. :)

So, if your head is swirling with thoughts that you may be too self-promotional, you probably aren't. Just share it.

PS. Dustin Curtis should pursue a career in marketing. Curating a network of quality bloggers would be a great move for him. He knows how to promote, design, and curate very well.

"I come from the school of thought that you need to be ultra-prepared and totally understand something and perfect it before even thinking about self-promotion...But, I realized that sometimes, you just need to ship and talk about what you're doing."

I think this is completely spot on, and it took me a long time to realize it. Recently, I'd been wanting to set up continuous deployment at our shop but I didn't know exactly the right way to do it. I also didn't post larger blog posts often at the time. I finally decided I wanted to post about doing continuous deployment with jenkins and capistrano [1].

So I set about to make it work. It's not the most elegant solution, and there are at least 3 things that are suboptimal with my method that I wouldn't use for a mission critical production use case...but we're using it for our own internal apps and our website, and so we don't care that much about those suboptimal bits.

Writing a blog post about how we were doing it generated tons of traffic to our site, and it also provoked a couple of conversations whereby I figured out a couple of things to do to make my method perfect - and subsequently gives me a new blog post later to write :)

Anyway, just wanted to throw in an anecdote - definitely think too many people get buried under the weight of 'but i'm not perfect yet'

[1] http://isotope11.com/blog/continuous-deployment-with-capistr...

Actually fame followed by action is a fairly well trodden route. Jeff Atwood and 37Signals come to mind straight away.

And to some extent Paul Graham. Granted, he successfully sold a startup during the dotcom years, but it's only with YCombinator that his achievements matched his essays.

I would most certainly exclude both 37 Signals and Paul Graham from such a list.

Why? SVN was pretty big before they launched Basecamp. I seem to remember even they saying it was instrumental to their success.

Granted, Paul Graham is a bit more of a stretch given that he's had a successful exit. But unlike YC, Yahoo Stores was hardly a major event in the wider scheme of things. Pre YC, I remember thinking that there was a major mismatch between his essays and his achievements.

He wrote two influential Lisp books, invented Bayesian spam filtering, did Arc, wrote essays (where the doing == the telling) and he had the Yahoo exit.

Then he started YC.

This doesn't disprove your primary point (that fame can precede the 'doing'), but I'd say that pg shouldn't be on the above list. You make a good point about 37signals, though. And I'll add Steve Yegge to that list too (Amazon -> Google)

> invented Bayesian spam filtering

Is Wikipedia wrong on this one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_spam_filtering#Histor...

I originally wrote 'popularized Bayesian spam filtering', but thought it wasn't strong enough. (What do you call 'made Bayesian spam filtering good enough, and then published an influential essay that caused the adoption and further improvement of the technique'?)

Thanks for the link - didn't find that in my cursory Google search.

Fair enough, though it depends a bit how you define achievement. Writing is in my opinion excluded almost by definition in this debate, otherwise the question of "what have Curtis / Gruber achieved?" is a bit moot. ARC is great, I'm sure, but not changing the world (yet). Bayesian filtering is a biggie, granted.

By the way, I don't mean to imply any criticism of people doing things in that order. On the contrary, a mismatch between fame through writing and "doing" seems like a good sign that you should buy a stake in that person, if that were possible.

"I remember thinking that there was a major mismatch between his essays and his achievements"

The mismatch between his essays and his achievements is the same for many people.

Luck and being in the right place. Among other things.

http://ycombinator.com/start.html

Bill Gates was also lucky. Not that he wouldn't have been able to have a successful company without the luck.

But he wouldn't have become the richest man in the world without it.

Simply being smart as everyone knows is not enough.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/business/luck-is-just-the-... From Gates himself: http://creating-luck.com/2012/01/30/bill-gates-on-pure-luck/ “I was lucky in many ways: I was lucky to be born with certain skills. I was lucky to have parents that created an environment where they shared what they were working on and let me to buy as many books as I wanted to, and I was lucky with timing. The invention of the microprocessor was something profound, and it turned out that only if you were young and you were looking at that could you appreciate what that meant. And I was obsessed with writing software, and it turned out that was the key missing thing that allowed the microprocessor to have this incredible impact. So in timing, in skill set, in some of the people I was lucky enough to meet – it’s unusual to have so much luck in one’s life, but it’s been a major factor in what I’ve been able to do.”

The good old luck coefficient argument - the amount of luck you have is the area under a graph where Y is "how many people know about it" and X is "what you do".

For some reason I can't find the specific blog talking about this right now, but it's a fairly straightforward logical concept.

That's a good way to put it. Would love to read the post talking about it, if you ever find it again.

I laughed a tiny bit when reading this comment because it highlights one of the points of the post.

If the blog you're referring to was written (or repeated) by one of the internet personalities mentioned here, we probably would have remembered who wrote it.

I'm fairly sure this must be the blog post you are trying to remember: [ http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf... ].

I know it looks like it, but I promise this is not an attempt at kissing Dustin Curtis' ass so he lets me in the Svtble network…

Agreed that both doing and telling are important. When done well, both can become an art-form. One thing I find myself struggling with all the time is switching between these two modes of thought. I find that the switching cost to go from 'doing' to 'telling' is even higher than flipping from 'doing A' to 'doing B'.

That's a really, really good point. Once I switch myself to "telling" mode, I find myself maniacally refreshing HN, replying to every tweet, obsessing over traffic stats and referrers, and doing countless other unproductive things.

I usually need a day or two before I feel comfortable ignoring the rest of the world while I switch back to "doing" mode.

I agree that both doing and telling are important, but I disagree they are equally important. In addition, I don't think that lack of self-promotion is such a widespread phenomenon that it warrants a blog post to raise awareness of the problem.

That's a clear case of survivor bias. The only people we hear about are the ones who self-promote, so we naturally assume that everybody self-promotes.

The truth is that there's a ton of people out there putting out great work without making a fuss about it, and thus not getting the recognition they deserve.

The amount of links per line of text in this article is really distracting.

Thanks for the feedback, I've toned it down.

Do > tell

Write > read

Think > speak

Left side matters more

Whether we like it or not, the truth of the matter is that telling is just as important as doing.

I'm a little unsure whether you mean "doing and then telling", or "telling in lieu of doing". It's confusing because the context is Curtis sort of unveiling some sort of blogging platform.

If the latter, it is notable that telling drowns out doing. Telling is a very poor substitute for doing anything, and pundits like Curtis, Gruber, that Microsoft-loving guy who I can't remember, Jeff Atwood...these guys have as little significance -- for their telling -- as a sports commentator who insists that the Yankees are the best. That's great, speak to your community and all, but utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

The trick is in trying to pivot your success building, essentially, followers, into success doing, which Atwood did to great success, and Curtis is now trying (Gruber is still stuck trying to pitch t-shirts). Good for Dustin to make that change, however the very valid comment that many have, as quoted in the article, is "why should this get hype?". Why should we assume that Curtis has any insight or particular value building a blogging platform just because he got a tonne of links for a highly suspect defense of 3.5" smartphone screens.

Why should we assume that Curtis has any insight or particular value building a blogging platform

I think Svbtle can be judged on its own merits. Did it have particular value for you or not? That's the key question.

My point was more that if you think Svbtle has value, it shouldn't be dismissed just on the grounds that Dustin Curtis is a pundit. Because being a good pundit has value as well in itself.

Of course, if you think Svbtle sucks, then no amount of hype will be able to change your mind, and that's the way it should be.

My point was more that if you think Svbtle has value, it shouldn't be dismissed just on the grounds that Dustin Curtis is a pundit.

And on that point I think everyone agrees. The people you are replying to aren't saying that it has no merit because Curtis is a pundit. They are saying that it doesn't have merit because he is a pundit.

I saw that unknown, unqualified project of completely unknown merit linked and heralded across the net. Why? It certainly isn't standing on its own at this point.

Right, but I'm not sure if the distinction is always that clear. Having a negative opinion about him because "he hasn't done anything" can also easily color your perception of Svbtle itself (insert link to Wikipedia page about some psychology principle here).

And I might be wrong, but I thought that the publicity was due in big part to the Svbtle vs Obtvse controversy. If he got all that coverage just by being Dustin Curtis then I guess I'm even more impressed with him…

John Gruber makes a quite decent living selling ads around his punditry--he doesn't need to sell t-shirts. His "telling" isn't about what he does, but what Apple does. So his "doing" is "telling." ;-)

He also invented what's turned into the latest quite successful ascii markup language (Markdown). That's pretty good doing, establishing a useful standard.

Nice little shot at Gruber in there. Classy

How is it a "shot" at Gruber? The author makes a valid observation that people do question what Gruber has done, and for valid reasons.

Opinions are a dime a dozen. Everyone has them. Being a famous blog commentator has little to do with profound wisdom or a particular insight, but usually speaks more to the raw ability to pander to an audience.

And for the record, I respect Gruber for Markdown. He gains zero respect for years of Apple punditry.

You're right, I didn't really intend this as a "shot" at Gruber, nor do I have any particular interest in defending him.

All I'm saying is that I count "being a pundit" in the "things Gruber has done" column along with Markdown, and respecting him (at least a little) for that.

I agree it isn't a shot at Gruber, it's a statement about what people might or might not think about Gruber. Which is fine. Personally, I didn't think that was the best part of the OpEd. Leaving Mr. Curtis out, let's compare Gruber to me. I pontificate on programming. Whether explicitly or by implictaion, I hold myself as having some authority on the subject by virtue of experience.

Looking at my track record... Hmmm... We are not talking about someone who invented anything significant. People can rightly take me to task for having an imbalance between my doing and my telling.

What about Gruber in comparison? He takes a lot of people to task for criticizing Apple. He's mostly a gadfly. He serves up "claim chowder." He talks about he industry in broad terms. But does he hold himself out as an expert? I don't think so.

In that, there is all the difference. Having an opinion and telling people your opinion without claiming you back your opinion with experience and/or expertise is always fine. Gruber is a reporter of sorts, a journalist. He reports what he sees and how he sees it, which is different than offring people advice on what to do from the presumed position of being an auhority.

I don't ask what Gruber has done, because he doesn't tell me how to interview programmers, or whether Ruby is a better language than CoffeeScript, or why funcional programming is a waste of time.

JM2C.

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