Why most people dream and only some do: The Go-Getter theory | Hacker News Reader

Why most people dream and only some do: The Go-Getter theory

davykestens.be

81 pointswallflower39 comments

Not that this is a bad theory, but do consider: Some people may come to realize that their ambitions and what actually makes them happy don't actually coincide. It's one thing to be a go-getter, and it's another to be content. You can go out and go get and make millions at business, but the money alone isn't your friend, won't keep you warm at night, can't hold an intellectually stimulating conversation... to say nothing of the sacrifices one makes for the happiness and security of family and children.

So go out and go get if you'd like, but don't go and judge everyone who hasn't. Maybe the factory pays well enough, the boredom is manageable, and the guy's got friends and family and is happy. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that.

Absolutely agree. Like many HNers I'm sure, I'm guilty of overblown ambitions, both with startups and with life (I get off on big ideas, love the pull of big cities, love the idea of living a worldly life, etc...)

I sat down with my cousin (buddhist) for breakfast when I was visiting him a few weeks ago. He works hard, went through medical school near home, and works at a practice near home. He's married now with 2 awesome kids, a lovely wife, and the four of them spend 5-6 days a week with our grandparents in San Jose. Just a super simple, super family-focused lifestyle.

It's something I've mulled over a couple times since then. It always makes me wonder: that's a great fucking life. Why aren't I attracted to living like that too? Am I better off for my ambitions?

Your cousin is a successful MD in the SF Bay area with a family, what planet do you live on where this is considered non-high-achieving/non-ambitious?

He's basically at the apex of society's status pyramid, that's why he doesn't give a fuck about any of the frivolous crap so many people chase around - he's already achieved his dream and he is probably the envy of many.

> what planet do you live on where this is considered non-high-achieving/non-ambitious?

I believe the fact that he doesn't see his cousin as ambitious confirms his self-diagnosed overblown ambition.

Hah. You make a good point. And if your question wasn't hypothetical, my satirical answer would be that I live in New York City - a place with sometimes laughably high standards for achievement and ambition.

And I mostly agree with you. He is probably the envy of many. Achievement? Sure. But ambition? I thought for a while about how to best explain my whole sentiment on this idea, and my mind kept coming back to an excerpt from PG's "Cities and Ambition", where he lists common areas of ambition:

"So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of life."

It's those kinds of things that I realized my cousin didn't give two shits about. And I admit, there's more than a couple things on that list that I've realized are root desires driving my ambition. Frivolous? Definitely. And I guess that's the basis for my aforementioned wonderings.

You aren't thinking this through. A doctor with a successful career is basically one or two steps away from extremely high levels of success/achievement.

Think of medical device patents, positions of power on medical associations, university positions, etc.

Many people achieve this sort of thing later in life, not during their 20s like some kind of internet media darling. A lot of people actually have kids and do the family BEFORE seeking their large-scale success. This is actually what most people do.

Interesting that you would phrase it that way. I was reading this thread and came back to it a few hours later so I saw the 1st follow-up, but not yours.

I would say that I'm in a similar boat right now, though I sometimes feel guilty for not chasing the startup. My wife, also a doctor, makes a ton of money. I make quite a bit of money. I like what I do, but it isn't all that fulfilling. However, we have a great family life with our two kids, 4 and 1. I don't think I could trade the family life for the dream of chasing a start-up right now. I've worked in several start-ups and know what it can take and I don't believe I would be willing to do that at this point in my life. Maybe in 10 years, definitely in 20.

That being said, I can understand what the other person said about being considered "non-ambitious". Think of it this way, some people (myself included) probably don't measure themselves by normal standards. I measure myself by the Gates' of the world. I've always done that. When I was playing sports, I didn't measure myself against the average or below average players and think "hey, I'm in the top 10% of this division/league/whatever", I would say "there are 10 people better than me and that cannot do". When I walk into the weight room or step onto the basketball court, I want to be considered the best. Not "one of the best", but "the best".

So, sometimes when a person like this mentally says they aren't going to go after something but still see others doing it, it it is hard on them in a variety of ways. Honestly, I can say that I feel like I'm going through a mini-midlife crisis realizing that I may well be 40 before I do my next start-up of my own and that is hard to take....even if I KNOW I'm making the best decision for my family, which is more important to me (meaning, I want a healthy marriage, well adjusted, well rounded kids more than I want the gulf stream jet).

So, all I'm trying to say is that the people on this board might well be the 1% or the top in their field, but they might also be the ones that only see the people that are better than them or have achieved more and by measuring against those people, they feel "non-ambitious/non-high-achieving".

I'm a big fan of keeping a firm, dry grip on reality while chasing after my entrepreneurial dreams.

I'm an entrepreneur with a business that is profitable, and with quite large ambitions, and all of that - I know EXACTLY how difficult it is and how lucky and persistent one has to be to make lots money or have a big exit, and I'm not there yet. Probably won't be for a while. I know that, because I live it every day I go in.

I think a lot of people (wantrapreneurs, basically) have this attitude where they think just because they compare themselves to ultra-high-achievers (the famous ones, basically), they think they're part of some exclusive club that has "high standards" or something.

Quite frankly that's bullshit, you either have achieved or you haven't, in my opinion the line of thinking that results in the conclusion that a successful doctor in the most expensive area of the richest state in the richest country in the world is to be looked down on, is just rampantly stupid.

TBH, I don't know what your point is in the above. I think most people in the scenario would know they have achieved something by the world's standards, but might not have by their own. They are not incongruous thoughts.

I would agree that someone else thinking a doctor is an underachiever would be wrong, but I wouldn't say so if the doctor themselves said that.

So, for me, it is more about realizing that I would like to achieve that, but not at the sacrifice it would take to my family at this moment in time. So, well done for realizing that it takes quite a bit of hard work with equal amounts of luck. Good luck doing it and, if you get there, you will have earned it.

Another article trying to generalize the concept of success... Not much worth reading there. The argument is those who apply the 80/20 rule are more successful entrepreneurs or doers in general. Perfectionism is an obstacle. As we say in french, "le mieux est l'ennemi du bien". Yeah, well, you can find thousands of counter-examples to that kind of principle. No one would ever have launched a rocket if they were not perfectionist at heart in the first place. You would not have thousands of products with almost no defects in your supermarket if there was no thorough QA system in place in every industry. Heck, you would probably be scared to fly a plane if the safety records were only 80/20 good enough.

Simple theories about life are elegant, but this one is simplistic at best. I think it really depends on your line of work.

In your example, plane safety has nothing to do with perfectionism of a person who runs the airline, it's simply the essential thing: no safety—not enough people flying to keep business profitable.

I agree that for a person who designs plane safety systems or performs QA, perfectionism might be a good quality. However, OP is talking about entrepreneurs, who don't normally design safety systems or perform QA. Entrepreneurs decide which things are necessary for a product to be “80/20 good enough”, but it doesn't necessarily mean that each of those things is of 80/20 quality itself. Now this is, actually, a bit simplistic.

Personally I tend to agree with the author, although the word “theory” may not belong to the headline. My observations mostly match his, and it's disappointing to frequently see cases when people with big potential just don't do things they (supposedly) love. Well, maybe they just have different definition of “love” and “passion”.

(Forgot to add: Also, I don't think perfectionism is the only or the primary point of the article, it's more about doing and being passionate.)

Well, if you take the example of video games entrepreneurs, the market expects you to be as good as the rest and you cannot just be "good enough". No matter if you're an indie game developer with few resources. You product needs to be polished to the very last bit.

The OP's point is mostly relevant when you are talking about new services, new ideas, new concepts which have never, ever been explored. True innovations. In such cases, you effectively have an advantage to rush it first on the market, and worry about the polish later. Unfortunately, such ideas are very rare, and following the author's advice will results in releasing half-baked not-so-cool products and then move to the next thing, because one feels it's "good enough".

There were tons of people in the past who thought their new products were "good enough" and failed miserably in the market, even among entrepreneurs. Because a lot of people have the same ideas at the same time, quality WILL inevitably make a difference.

The problem with the OP's post is that he provides no examples to demonstrate how good is his theory. Because it's just that. A theory, with no living examples of it.

Being perfectionist is not about getting to the perfect product. It's about trying your *ss off to create such a good one that everyone will say "Wow!".

And yet the team from Duke Nukem proves that you can in fact be too perfectionist.

And still end with a $%#% product after so many years.

Well, a team that does not even deliver a product cannot be called perfectionist. That's just procrastination. They only managed to deliver once being bought over by Gearbox and given additional resources and time to just ship the unfinished game. The end product speaks for itself : obviously noone was satisfied with it, not even the ones who made it.

Then in your first example being polished to the last bit from the user perspective would become essential. There still are things you can sacrifice, e.g., the source code running the game doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be “good enough”.

Although I think in your first example “being polished” is a subjective value. There's not such thing as being polished 100% and not less, you have to stop somewhere anyway. I think there's a complex relationship between gameplay, polished interface, marketing efforts, maintainable code, etc., and your entrepreneur objective is to pick when it's a “good enough” combination.

Also, I'd disagree with you, a lot of games aren't really polished, say some popular Zynga's products I am guilty I had been using some years ago—although I'm not an expert in game industry (maybe it's a different market, or things has changed).

Our family did a Spring Break expedition to Washington DC, including a visit to the Smithsonian Air & Space museum. In the Air & Space museum was the Goddard liquid fuel rocket. I was impressed by how crudely it was brazed (globs of brazing, not beautifully flowed)... but it flew, and proved the principle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard#First_liquid-...

I feel like I've been reading a copy of this article every six months for the past ten years or so.

The problem with this article and its spiritual predecessors is essentially that the author never read _Fooled by Randomness_. He's a successful 20-something; right now, his successes and others' failures look intentional to him, like the natural result of hard work, talent or enthusiasm (or lack thereof). Where's he going to be in ten years? Writing those other articles we see every six months, provisionally entitled "how I screwed up and lost everything." Of course, when that happens he'll probably blame his big setback (and others' successes) on randomness rather than on a lack of hard work, talent or enthusiasm.

I'm a fairly big screw-up. Is there anyone interested in a blog post on how I got where I am?

Asking for upvotes to indicate interest seems distasteful, so feel free to comment here or email me (profile).

Why not? It's bound to be interesting.

Not really sure I agree with the article. Most of the top entreprnrs I know/heard of did rather well at school. While some may drop out, they didn't drop out as 2.0 students, but rather generally bright and recognized students who could have proceeded academically if so inclined (think Gates, Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Yang, Filo, etc...).

The perfectionism makes some sense, but seems at odds with the current infatuation with Jobs. Jobs couldn't find the right beige from a set of 200 and had to design a new beige. He seemed like the ultimate perfectionist -- sometimes. I think maybe the point is better made that there are times to be a perfectionist and times not to be. I think the hard part is figuring out when those times are.

Jobs delivered. His company Apple delivered a new version every year. That always was his trump card, perfectionism came within these bounds.

When FaceTime was the only feature he liked, he dropped everything else and announced on stage that it is the only main thing that they've added (and then went on about how cool it is). There's a video on the net [1] showing him as NeXT CEO and even then he talked about the time they've got to make it work and how they can fit into it.

[1] http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/11/20/watch-steve-jobs...

It sounds like its about prioritization and selection of tasks as much as it is about knowing when to stop improving things.

This gets into what (should be) basic project management knowledge. There is only a certain amount of scope and level of quality that is possible given a fixed set of resources and time.

I think a lot of groups try to do too many different things perfectly and spread themselves too thin, ultimately sacrificing quality and letting deadlines slip. They should be putting extra time and effort into the most important things, leaving off of other problems when the solutions are good enough, and dropping or deferring some unimportant tasks.

Jobs also said "real artists ship." Perfectionism with set deadlines seems to be a pretty good compromise-obsess with making your product as good as it can be but don't let product concerns push back your deadlines.

I can't stand the "good enough" crowd, I hate it when people aim for mediocrity.

It takes the same amount of time and energy to go from zero to "OK" as from "OK" to "good". From "good" to "very good" is even harder. So a lot of people (I see this a lot with artists, I'm sure it's the same with startups) stop at "OK", then see how hard it is to stand out from the crowd and how much more effort it takes and hope to being discovered (=someone doing the work and taking them to the next level and making them rich) And then they start whining because everybody tells them how talented they are.

Life is easier when everyone else is a failed version of yourself, amirite?

Like a few others, I disagree with his point about perfectionism being a bad quality. I suppose this may just come down to semantics (the definition of perfectionism), but I don't think being a perfectionist necessarily means that one is incapable of deciding when to release and move on.

I've been a perfectionist my entire life. In elementary school, I used to do all my work in pen. It felt neater and more permanent. When I was forced to use pencil, I would throw away entire sheets of paper rather than erase and leave a smudge. In high school, my latin teacher called me "Mr. P", short for "Mr. Perfection." He'd hold up my quizzes for the class to see, and laugh at how I used a ruler to perfectly frame the declension tables I'd drawn, and how I'd used my pencil to lightly shade the background of the title row.

Excessive? Yes. But I've learned to reign it in and use it to my advantage.

A huge percentage of the success of any creative endeavor (whether it's painting, programming, song-writing, whatever) boils down to how much effort its creator put into it. Often, the only difference between a good creator and a great one is the amount of time they spend striving for perfection. If your goal is greatness, a tendency to say "good enough" prematurely can be disastrous. No, give me a pupil with an eye for perfection and the perseverance to achieve it, prioritization skills be damned. I can teach him to prioritize.

A pragmatic perfectionist is a force to be reckoned with.

I used to use 'perfectionist' as my bad trait in interviews. (Apparently a lot of people try this, though. I didn't know that.)

And I actually think it is bad, if left unchecked. But I also think that laziness is the same way. Unchecked, it's horrible. Kept in check, it makes sure you do the minimum work needed to get something done.

Combine the 2 traits and you get things done properly with the minimum work needed.

So maybe there aren't any bad traits, only traits that aren't being kept in check?

http://www.davykestens.be/self-improvement/why-im-an-asshole

His followup post is interesting also. After receiving hate-mail for putting down 9 to 5'ers, he explains that he is jealous...

I love the phrase, "Better done than done better." It's suitable for many situations in life.

In the last few months, I've been running my life off a weekly task list that includes both my personal and business tasks and objectives. I build the task list each Monday morning based on goals I set out at the beginning of the year (such as improve my Chinese, for a personal goal, or get software license signed, as a business goal.) This has definitely pushed me to complete many tasks that could have easily just not gotten done.

That said, I think he paints a binary picture of people who are either go-getters who act now to achieve their goals vs. dreamers who never get anything done. In my experience, these are two ends of a spectrum, where it's important to move back-and-forth between each end to achieve goals and objectives.

By the way, he has a wonderful point about "The Go-Getter loves what he does (and delegates the rest)" I am way too guilty of doing it all myself, when I should instead spend a little bit of money to have other people do things for me that are not key to what I want.

I think the 'passion' bit is wrong. It's no needed, and it's not always helpful.

Go to any game dev forum and you'll find a ton of passionate posts by people who have designed a game but don't have any skills and can't make it. Except for a few of them, they aren't funneling that passion into anything that gets the job done. They're just begging other people to do it for them.

I disagree with the point about perfectionism being a bad "quality". Of course its definitely not a good idea to make everything perfect; A craftsman might strive to make a perfect wooden closet but not when cooking the food he eats while he is making the closet.

Here's two points I can really relate to:

    - Don't waste effort on something that isn't important.
    - Focus on the next task, as in, execute in the best way possible.

They seem contradictory, but really this next point can resolve it:

    - Don't do anything unimportant.

In 2007 I really wanted to study a Software Engineering and Commerce degree and the degree had a UAI requirement of 94.45.

I graduated high school that year with a UAI of 94.55.

(UAI stands for University Admission Index and was used in one of the states in Australia.)

So you're a go-getter type of person, you wake up every morning destined to make life do exactly what you want it to.

What happens when you're trapped by your own choices because they were the most logical choice to make? You feel every day like you're letting yourself down, even though you are doing the exact opposite and should be proud of yourself for sticking with it?

That's the situation I'm in - decided to finish school because I've only got a semester and a thesis to go. And it's making me miserable, every couple of days I get a cool idea I want to pursue, but de facto goes into the "not now" bin.

You'll also have a cool idea every couple of days when you become an entrepreneur. Being able to focus on what's needed now until you reach the "good enough" stage is a great skill, and many fail simply because they don't have the focus to go in the same direction for more than a few weeks. Look at it as training for what's to come.

To be honest, it felt much better when I was letting school fall by the wayside a bit and focused more on a startup. Of course when that failed, it made more sense to finish up school than dive head-first into the next startup.

Still, I know in my brain this was the right decision, but I don't feel it.

I think this theory points out some good things but you're still going to need a good work ethic to do anything.

People who've made a 2.0 their entire life might not have the greatest work ethic compared to 4.0ers.

> People who've made a 2.0 their entire life might not have the greatest work ethic compared to 4.0ers.

People who mind numbingly grind away at getting a 4.0 in today's education system might not have the greatest amount of sense compared to some of the 2.0ers.

Look, usually your average 2.0 student isn't going to be better than your average 4.0 student and everything will fit the model as expected. But, we're not talking about the general person in the group, we're talking about the outliers. They're not just clustered at the 4.0 end, they're kinda all over. There's going to be those rare times when a 2.0 student will smoke the hell out of a 4.0 person who won't even know what hit them because they're not realizing that the 2.0 student is playing an entirely different game than the 4.0 student and the 4.0 student may not have even noticed the other game exists.

"Good enough" is not good enough - you need to do better than the average. If you make something good enough, you'll spend more time fixing st later. Paying more attention to details now means you won't have to worry about them later. At least that's what I found to be true... but yeah, breaking everything down into small steps and working on them now is better than dreaming about the big end...

I actually didn't read this, I just read the bold text, I think I have a pretty good idea what the author was trying to communicate.

Sounds a bit like "getting things done". Anyway, it strikes me that there are 2 components to "accomplishing things". The first is the reason, which comes out as passion. But where does it come from? Nobody talks about that. For me it is religion. I think there has to be some preposterous irrational belief that ties down all of that motivation. Nothing sane could support the motivation of an ambitious person. Second is the how. And that can be studied scientifically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com