You're just making excuses

excid3.com

11 points·Swizec··4 comments

The Jobs example is pretty strange. He was already a gazillionaire by the time he returned to Apple a second time, so that's not really much of a case study in achieving success.

His initial success was not really a nose-to-the-grindstone kind. He spent some years bouncing between part-time college, traveling to India to seek enlightenment, working on and off at Atari (where he paid Woz to do some of that work for him!), doing some LSD, miscellaneous other stuff. Then co-founded a company with Woz that got big within about a year.

After that he seems to have developed perfectionist workaholic kind of habits, which is an odd case of a slacker who made it big, and then became hard-working. Strange trajectory.

It's a different type/level of success that he achieved the second go around.

That's true, but I think not really a major problem to be solved: the question of how to achieve even more success when you have $100m+ in the bank is: 1) not one most people are likely to have; and 2) not really all that hard, because there are a lot of opportunities if you have that kind of cash.

The hard problem is making the first million, which as Jobs shows, comes in a lot of strange ways.

Definitely agreed, and maybe it was a bad example. I was just trying to point out different angles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com