Oh, the Places You'll Go

"Great" things also depends on your timing and what the competition is doing. (Remember Job's Newton?) Bad timing could be having the right product at the wrong time. Good timing a little earlier than the competition in some cases. As well as luck. And also honesty and how you deal with people you work with, suppliers. And this only scratches the surface.

I mean even with respect to sports the winner in any given year is dependent on the quality of the other teams or individuals playing, right? The second fastest man would be the fastest if the fastest didn't run that race.

"It's that greatness comes from doing. The more you do the more chances for greatness."

And in a sense the key to the VC business. If you put your money behind enough possibilities (with some reasonable vetting) some of those ideas will succeed. I mean if they could predict better the ideas that would hit (even assuming the timing was right and there was nobody else trying the same idea) they would have a much better success rate than what the currently have, right? The success rate is not great actually.

"I certainly would like to know tips that would make it more likely that the things I ship, write, create will be well received and popular"

One of the problems with reading to much about what others say (on HN or elsewhere) is that you get a watered down version of the world since there are always different points of view. (Horse by committee is a camel?) No single vision directing things. To many points of view. Something that I am able to achieve given my skills, knowledge the way I was raised and a million other variables might not be the right approach for you. Just like you may be able to walk up to a random woman in a bar and pick her up with a line and an approach that wouldn't work for me. Just like Jobs could make people do things by his words and his presence, his looks, his voice that (insert smart but dull person here) can't.

Facebook ships every day, and in the early days they shipped continually because they were editing the code on the live servers (no revision control even). I doubt that anyone would have called the very first version of facebook "great", but they've shipped thousands of times since then, and now they have product with a billion users. And of course Facebook wasn't his first product either -- remember the Facemash story?

In general, I find that a close inspection of these success stories only uncovers a hidden backstory where, in fact, the protagonists are developing "muscle memory." And this doesn't necessarily mean that they were building a startup, were the best in their field, or even went through the commercial marketplace! It means only that they accumulated the right mix of skills and experience to see - and then reach - success.

Clearly Zuckerberg was, at the bare minimum, used to whipping up CRUD-style web sites - and had even started taking on contract work - before he decided to start on Facebook. He didn't wake up one day, say "social networks, what a great idea," and learn PHP and MySQL all at once. He arrived at a position where it was natural to work on one as an extrapolation from his existing experience, an incremental leap out of the comfort zone.

Just "doing" is not equivalent; lots of people "do" every day, but don't grow or challenge themselves.

A friend gave me this book when I quit my salary job 3 years ago; I've read it to my 2yr old boy many, many times.

I don't. In sports, we use "muscle memory" to refer to on-the-fly adaptations that athletes have to perform without conscious thought. For example, a basketball player sees his defender lean too far in one direction, and he automatically knows when to stop, jump and shoot in order to avoid being blocked. The shooter did not have to consciously think "Oh, he leaned that way, so I need to correct this way." That's too slow. The right thing to do is ingrained from hours of drilling and live practice. My sport of choice is Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and I see the same thing with myself all the time. When I feel my opponents weight shift, I don't consciously think about how to flip him over. If I do, he'll already have moved. I just know what to do, based on years of drilling and live training.

So, I extend the metaphor to software to rather the opposite of what you said. Always applying a default toolset is the opposite of on-the-fly adaptations. "Muscle memory" for solving software problems is being able to reason about what you know you can handle without having to pick a technology up front. It's having an intuition of what what the technology allows you to do. You're not thinking in terms of technology, you're thinking in terms of solving the problem and being able to easily classify things as "I know how to handle" and "I don't know yet how to handle."

The benefit of software over sports is that we have the luxury of time; we have the time to check our intuitive guesses through rational evaluation.

Page didn't always rock. No doubt he had to figure it out like everyone else, but when he did he was clearly a Great song writer and riff maker. And that's Great with a capital G.

When someone asks me this (or questions like it, since I don't type that many semicolons these days) I always reply "Stop looking at the trees. See the forest".

I'm not sure this makes me any more popular, but if you see semicolons (or parens, or whitespace) you are not reading the code. Sometimes, this has to be pointed out.

Agree and it feeds into the idea that you need to have some grand plan in your mind at all times. When you read stories about people in the news they are always presented as very clearly being "a" or "b". "He always knew he wanted to be President" or "He wanted to be a ball player but ended up being President". Anyway the question can in some cases even be annoying and make you feel defensive. I dated a girl once who insisted on knowing what it was I liked about a particular dish. Why is it important why I like pizza? I just like pizza. Think a minute (if you are a straight guy) about why you like tits. Go ahead. Not sure about you but I can't answer that question. I just like the way they look. Is that an adequate answer? It triggers some thing in me that makes me feel good. I think it's easier many times to describe what you don't like, than what you like. I like air conditioning because high humidity makes me feel yucky. So air conditioning helps me avoid a negative feeling.

I think the key is like you detailed. In the specificity of the question.