Several Truths Regarding Success | Hacker News Reader

Several Truths Regarding Success

risingthumb.xyz

19 pointsFLpxpyJ21 comments

In my opinion, the best way to be successful is simply to forget about failure and just keep doing things until they work. 90% of the reason why people don't succeed is because they dwell upon failure instead of thinking the entire process as a learning experience.

kinda agree, it seems to be about the self-sabotage, the survivor bias I see in those who are successful, is that they have overcome whatever blocks everyone else. virtually everyone is getting in their own way, and somehow, for a brief period of time at least, those who get out of their own way become disproportionately more effective at whatever they're doing. most of the points in the article read to me as being the symptoms of self sabotage and blocking oneself.

if someone can set aside their ego, it works. keeping humility seems to be key to being open to creating feedback loops that drive learning. it feels to me like everyone has the potential, but so very few are able to truly get out of their own way

Culture is invisible to those who are in it, and I expect this point is also largely invisible to mostly everyone in the article's audience: The author never defines success, just takes it as a given that everyone agrees on what success is, and he seems to mean "become rich".

There are many other kinds of success: Becoming famous, making people laugh, living a contented life, having a great family, having lots of good friends, etc.

Normally, this wouldn't bother me so much, but it irks me that the author refers to the people who have perhaps chosen a different definition of success than the standard capitalist "wealth at all cost" as "leeches".

I guess my definition for someone who pursues wealth at all cost, without regard for anything else, wouldn't be much more charitable than that.

The implicit definition of "success" from the article is probably navigating through the capitalist value system established by the market, and making a profit. It also implies that this "market-based" monetary value system is fair. There are much more complex and incomprehensible underlying social interactions that create this value system as it is. Your output as an individual is hardly ever proportional to success in that sense.

A successful CEO has climbed the corporate ladder and social hierarchy, and now their decisions are a force multiplier that mutates the values in that system. A busy carpenter is stuck doing chairs and desks, and the values of chairs and desks are dependent on everything else in the economy.

And yet I've met CEOs who keep saying how they want to quit and become carpenters.

>> I am generally of the opinion that this general statement holds true:

"Make a high quality work, make people who are interested aware of its existence somewhere during the last 10% of the work, and actually finish and deliver it... and it will succeed".

The phrase "high quality work" is doing some heavy lifting there. All too often programmers read "code" instead of work, since that's thr important part right?

But code is the least valuable least interesting, part of the work. In reality the work includes market analysis, solving an actual problem, funding, marketing, documenting training, sales, support, and perhaps some luck.

Sure, do all that well and you'd likely be a success. But if you think it means "just code better", well github is full of good code that was ignored.

This is not about "build a better mousetrap", its about having a mouse problem, and delivering that mouse trap to consumers who pay you money.

The elephant in the room which this article is resoundingly in denial about (freely admitted in the site subtitle) is luck.

You can finish something of high quality and market it, and still fail, while something shoddy or incomplete goes viral and becomes a huge success.

Yes, I was writing a similar comment about luck being a huge factor in success when I was beaten to the market by brazzy’s post :)

I'd estimate that at least 1/1000 people are capable of running this gauntlet; so in my opinion this is a little pessimistic. That being said, the gentleman is hitting the message like a carpenter in a hurry.

> ... the vast majority of people being leeches ...

Yeah, but unfairly pejorative. Babies and old people are technically leeches too but we love them and shouldn't call them that.

It is fairer to be accurate and say most people don't create much in the way of resources. You can see this play out pretty straightforwardly if you assume a dollar in savings represents about a dollar of value created that wasn't then consumed. Most people struggle to get that metric positive.

That is fine though. Capitalism forces people not to be outrageous resource drains and even tilts the scales in the micro so that someone with no savings still probably made a positive contribution to the overall wealth of the nation.

> You can see this play out pretty straightforwardly if you assume a dollar in savings represents about a dollar of value created that wasn't then consumed.

I think this assumption is false to the point it invalidates the results. Because savings is marginal, if the relationship between value and dollars is off by only a little, the delta between net value and savings becomes huge. A good hint this assumption is wrong is if it were true, the value produced by a slave would be zero.

> most people don't create much in the way of resources

Then nobody would pay them for their labor.

Ressources are not all, tho. Maintenance and care is very important to society and including social maintenance and care. It’s mostly invisible and “cost”, not “surplus” but society couldn’t work without it. One part is the invisible work (mostly done by women) to care for others unpaid, but there’s also the cleaning, fixing, etc.

> Babies and old people are technically leeches

They are leeching, but I'd say "a leech" is someone who's lifetime average contribution is negative.

> assume a dollar

Hmm, at risking falling into a "glassmakers fallacy" type complexity, I feel money is transactional, and what it represents wrt "value" is complicated and cannot easily be divorced from the transactional nature (though it is handy shorthand for value in limited ways). From the perspective of an individual, a dollar earned via say, labour exchange is a dollar "created", but in general wealth was not really created, just transferred. I don't think individuals need to be on the hook for true wealth creation (humanity gets it for free, probably from the sun), but rather fair distribution - the things money buy are resources, much like one's personal time, and resources should in general be balanced, but not in a strict communist style, rather more than equal opportunity to acquire resources, with a market-led definition of value.

Define "negative."

Include externalities.

I think negative has a pretty clear definition in this context, if you want to say more about "externalities" maybe I can talk about it.

I’ll also add that very successful people always have a group of people supporting their success without themselves being seen as ‘productive’ (often a spouse is part of it, but also secretaries, students, etc.)

Interesting way of looking at it, although it aught to be clarified this is some sort of "mean average" success for capitalising on an idea, ignoring other definitions of success, non-standard paths to success (which are probably the norm for most), and luck factors etc.

Disagree on the leeches point, just because someone trades their time for resources in a convoluted way doesn't necessarily mean they're leeching.

  I'd say in a given week, I probably only do about 15 mins of real,actual work.

https://youtu.be/zBfTrjPSShs?si=GBocyVAApYKMIl9r&t=58

I think that the blog post is missing a key aspect of success: its subjective, and not bound by absolute rules.

This automatically rejects 4 out of the 6 "Truths" listed in the blog post.

Finishing something is not the definition of success, specially because "finishing" can mean anything to anyone and arguably there is no such thing as "finished".

"Quality" is also very subjective and can mean anything to anyone, and it's definitely not a key part of success. We have companies which became successful in spite of being based on MVPs hastily put together to rush to market, and rewriting a mess of a MVP is not what makes the company or the development effort a success.

The "Marketing" bit sounds like a rejection of all other points in the blog post, and it's also tied to the subjective definition of "success".

The blurb on the Pareto principle is clearly not involved in any metric of success. This is only the author expressing his personal concerns on how they find it hard to deliver after over-promising and facing the likelihood of underdelivering on that promise.

Overall I don't think there is anything of substance on this blog post. It sounds like the author has trouble setting his personal and professional goals and struggles to meet them at a standard that he feels he is bounded to deliver. Even though that might match the blogger's personal definition of a rewarding outcome, I feel that even from their personal standpoint the definition of success actually depends exclusively on what they commit to deliver. Someone in their shoes might actually do better if they don't promise to deliver the blogger's definition "quality" and proceed to actually finish what they promise because it's achievable and realistic and they don't have to turn themselves into a martyr to reach an arbitrary goal.

Just a few responses/thoughts on this article:

> Truth 1: People convince themselves not to do something

True. This is likely in part due to the amount of tedious busywork it requires to get anything done in a large organisation, since after your attempts at productivity are ruined by meetings, managers, dependencies, etc, it can become very easy to go "sod it", and just do the bare minimum.

> Truth 2: Actually finishing something

As the saying goes, the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time. Or something similar.

Add to this how the last 10% of the work is often the boring stuff that isn't fun to work on, and it's no surprise most creatives give up on most of their projects.

> Personally, my standards of quality are much higher so I'd be much more aggressive about this, and say 95% of everything is crap. As a result of this, you will also find success if you produce something of quality.

This might be too optimistic, since people tend to disagree on what the last 5% of quality work is, and will often get tricked by flashy marketing, overconfidence, a slick presentation, etc. So it's not enough to do good work, you also have to be good at selling it as good work.

> Regarding marketing of work

> Most people don't know how to market themselves.

And most people don't seem to bother at all, which is probably the biggest reason their projects fail. No, "build it and they'll come" isn't a good strategy in 2024.

> The Pareto Principle

> As a result, one can observe that 80% of the work is done for 20% of the effort.

Very true, and if you're outside a field, a project or work that only gets the first 80% of the work done will look identical to one that gets 100% of it done. If your work looks visually 'complete', it's very easy to trick people into thinking you know a lot more about the topic than you actually do, or that your project is more impressive than it actually is.

(see 99% of 'Classic video game remade in Unreal Engine!' videos on YouTube and social media)

And success and failure being iterative is sadly 100% true. Probably because the more you succeed, the more resources you have for future efforts, meaning it's easier to hire the right people, pay for things you can't do yourself, not get burnt out by another job, etc. Meanwhile failure breeds desperation, and drives people away, since it seems like they almost fear it like a contagious disease...

> America for example, with its liberties and capitalist reward in line with the Matthew effect provides good reward to the good people.

I'm not detecting sarcasm...

I don't understand how any grown adult can look at America, with its history of socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poorest and most vulnerable, and say with a straight face that 'good people get good rewards' in America.

> All opinions are my own. If it stings, so much for your painkillers!

Aaron, try and open your mind to the idea that some of your opinions actually aren't that good.

The UK and America are dramatic examples of societies where the absolute worst people are highly rewarded and unaccountable, while the best people are smeared, marginalized, and even tortured.

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