Hang Around with People who Get Shit Done
jaxn.org
jaxn.org
- People with vision, who can recognize potential in a concept or idea
- People who, given an idea, can conceptualize all the use cases and rare exceptions
- People who can initiate projects and provide good momentum for all those involved
- People who take a task, buckle, down and get their part done
- People who carefully examine other folks' work to check for mistakes
- People who can take a languishing project and bring it through to completion
- People who play constructive devil's advocate, helping you consider all the possible risks
- People with all sorts of other skills that I didn't think of right now
- People who slack
When building a team, you'll need almost all of these personality types (you could probably leave out the slacker, though). Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater by only looking for the "manager" types or the "coder" types.
I fully expect the next few years to be my most productive ever, because I'm coming into a team that makes me feel like a total novice in the best way possible. They're very nice and willing to share their knowledge while we hone our craft together. I can't wait.
Anyone in mountain view up for some road biking and learning how to kiteboard in the next few months? I also climb, but I'm a bit rusty/heavy.
Then there's the guy I knew in college who spent hours of every day playing Runescape and who once told me that his math teacher had said to him: "You are the smartest student I have ever had fail this class."
Slackers are fun to hang out with, though...
You gain respect from others who get shit done by getting shit done. It's not just important to hang around folks who do things, you need to participate in the community by doing things yourself.
The advice "hang around people who do things" and "dump people who don't do things" is very much losing the forest for the trees.
I would think this is obvious. To me the biggest part about hanging out with people who get stuff done is seeing what it takes to get stuff done, and then doing that.
Thanks for the feedback.
You gain respect from others who get shit done by getting shit done.
Alternatively, cool shit might get done. I'd say hang around with people who want to do cool shit and kick their arses into getting shit done if necessary.
Just curious - aren't we all judged every single day, by how much 'useful' or 'productive' we are? At work, among friends, while trying to find a mate..heck, even within families.
Every moment of you life shouldn't be devoted to doing stuff, unless you want it to. I find moments when I am not doing anything, or maybe watching TV, just as important to my personal development as when I am building stuff (trying in my case). It's about a holistic approach. 'Getting shit done' should be taken with moderation as should 'not getting shit done'.
My wife keeps asking where I get the energy to do so much. Answer: I don't, it's not about having the energy, it's about just doing what needs to be done.
Hang around people who are passionate about things and try to make your circle include people passionate about very different things.
For instance, I do participate in flashmobs organized via Facebook and I didn't know anyone there the first time I went. Some friends are the core group of a well known latin-american mailing list dedicated to crack software (and most of them learned how to use cracking tools by hanging around in the list). These friends are from small towns around Argentina (where usually there are very few interesting people). Also, lots of charities and political parties are open for people who want to do things and organize via internet.
It's a bad idea to pigeon hole yourself into "hanging around" one type of person or one people who are dominant in one type of trait. The whole reason people build teams is to maximize differing traits to gain the most value from each. You'll gain the most from life from leaning to recognize this as early as possible.
In this case, people that "get things done" at youth levels are generally those with strong implementation skills - the "doers" of the world if it were. But implementers are only part of the picture. There are several other personality types that are just as beneficial to outcomes, and by excluding them you exclude many strengths in the name of pure productivity.
eykanal leads into this in his comment but I'd like to expand on it a bit.
Stereotyping examples here for ease of explanation:
People with strong vision and ideas tend to be able to see 10 steps ahead of others. However these people also tend to be horrible at getting things done on their own. Their joy is looking forward, not being in the moment. Without these people however, we cannot move forward. These people will be the ones that think it would be neat to build an Eiffel Tower out of toothpicks in the first place.
People with an eye for detail tend to be strong editors/coaches etc. These people might not dream up new approaches or work hard to see them to completion, but they are experts at critique and can notice, for instance, that the toothpick Eiffel Tower could be 3 feet higher if you simply adjusted the angle at which you glued the toothpicks together by 5 degrees.
People who "get shit done" often tend to be implementers. They may have seen that toothpick Eiffel Tower in a book or heard about it from a friend, but they went out and got the resources and started putting things together.
My entire point: None of these people are more or less valuable than any other. It isn't the skill-set that is the important variable, but the degree at which the person employs their talents that matters. Suggesting your child should "hang around" the implementers while discarding others is basically teaching them that only certain key talents are valuable and the rest are garbage.
That type of thinking actually reduces their long term chances of success, because like it or not, no one person can be outstandingly good at every viable human talent. People who realize what they aren't good at will team up with others who excel in that talent and will get much further ahead overall.
Accept and reject individuals. Don't evaluate personality types. Some of the most profound thinkers in history were slackers. Some of the best coaches of elite athletes suck at the sports they teach.
It was not my intent to pigeon hole people based on their outcomes. Time spent doing is different than creating or implementing.
For instance, reading all of the Harry Potter books is getting something done too. Flipping channels on the couch all day, not so much. The skateboard example in my post is also a good one - that is getting something done. Standing around the ramp and pretending to skate isn't.
Also, coaching is doing something cool.
As for the comment about visionaries. Doesn't that only matter if they can sell their vision? And wouldn't "selling a vision" be getting something done. (I don't mean sales in the $$$ way, just in the sense of transferring the vision to others and maybe inspiring action)
Thinking isn't really doing, but sharing those thoughts is. Frankly, the most profound thinkers who never shared their thoughts in a way that impacted others had no real impact on the world.
Visionary skills - especially in children - are often discouraged harshly as "slacking" in our productivity obsessed culture.
Like any skill, it needs to be nurtured and encouraged. It takes tremendous self-confidence and guts to voice that you see something could be improved. The world is not normally kind to these people. True visionary skill isn't often seen until the college years. Interestingly enough, it's in college that this type of skillset starts to be rewarded.
It also needs to be practiced, and this is where I think you react too heavily in your judgement.
Flipping channels on the couch all day, not so much. Standing around the ramp and pretending to skate isn't.
The fact is that in many cases, there might be a hell of a lot of activity happening in that child that isn't immediately evident to you. The child might be thinking of how it would be really cool to have a laser like that guy in the cartoon and pondering all the things that could be accomplished with such a device. The other kid might be looking at the skateboard and wondering if the board could be shortened half a foot to make landings easier.
Yet, you've discarded these kids. They are slackers that you don't want your child to associate with. They don't produce anything after all. That's a poor lesson to teach.
Be clear, this isn't to say that there aren't some kids that are just lazy couch potatoes, but the point is that you can only figure this out by getting to know the child. The idea that becomes the seed for your child's life mission could very well come from the person you've told him to avoid. How sad is that?
I've always found it interesting that reading, as a form of entertainment, always seems to be held on a pedestal compared to television, cinema, or videogames. It's a kind of elitism that the literati hold over everyone who doesn't find reading as enjoyable as them. Consider this: one person reads the entire Harry Potter series and another reads the entire Twilight series, both are reading but the quality of the material is completely different. Assuming that literature is de facto superior to any other form entertainment is completely ignorant and wrong.
In this case, swap "flipping channels all day", which could include watching informative shows such as Bill Nye, How It's Made, or Mythbusters, with "watching Jersy Shore all day" and confusion about entertainment quality preferences are removed.
Granted, I'd rather kids read something more enlightening than the World Weekly News.
“One of my mentors asked me what was better – to spend 10 hours in front of the TV or to spend 10 hours doing other activities. Of course, I said the latter – there are few things I think that are worse than just sitting in front of the TV. Wrong, he said. It makes no difference – because what matters is how intensely you do any of those activities. It’s how much intensity you inject into those 10 hours rather than how you superficially spend them. If you watch TV intensely, with purpose, for 10 hours, you probably spent those 10 hours well.”[0]
I acknowledge that watching with purpose and flipping channels are different things—the point is, maybe what you do matters not as much as how you do it.
Perhaps watching TV is an activity that by its nature discourages any purpose and intensity, while reading has opposite effect? (Although I totally can read with my mind half-off, so it probably depends on an individual.)
[0] http://thescenicroute0.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/passion-make...
Now, it's only a correlation; the kids who read a lot as children may have done so simply because they had some kind of stronger innate language skills. I'm not a psychology researcher or a neuroscientist, but it's definitely an interesting anecdote to me :)
I suspect there is a positive correlation to time spent reading with success measures like education level, test scores, etc. I also suspect the correlation to TV time is more along the lines of being overweight, unemployment, etc.
Any science behind that? Nope. Sort of a confirmation of the stereotype you are suggesting. I could look for studies to prove / disprove it, but I would likely suffer from confirmation bias.
I learned so much from TV, watched hours of it every day, hung around with a variety of types (none of them "productive") and barely read anything until I was 16. It didn't stop me from achieving highly by conventional measures of academic, business and general "productivity".
I hate the idea that children need to be managed to have the right friends. They need to figure stuff out themselves; let them have the friends they want, provided there's no abuse or damaging behaviour.
Let kids be kids!
I also think this advice can have negative repercussions. I have friends who think "I can only be disciplined and accomplish anything if I am around inspiring people," and use it as an excuse to accomplish nothing on their own and be an emotional leech when they are around successful people.
For me this is most evident when observing where I (/ my friends) live. If you live with people who drink four nights a week, guess what...you probably will too. If you live with people who cook healthy food and go running three times a week there is a much greater chance you will too.
Obviously you can rise above your surroundings but if you have a goal then you should put yourself in an environment conducive to getting there.
Driven, Creative, Intelligent, professional, and Open-minded are a couple of my general "qualifications" I use when deciding where I should put my effort.
It might sound cold and calculating, but that is because I am trying to put no bias into it. I promis I am not that ruthless and cold.
Related: Show HN posts: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053427
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/health/25iht-fat.4.6830240...
While the results of this study are fairly intuitive, they also are fairly profound. When I take step back and look at my core group of friends and how we have evolved over the years, it is frightening to notice the similarities in our evolution (if you can call it that).
Just my $0.02
Experience is more important than achievement.
I think being around people that aren't necessarily "productive" is perfectly fine. It's being around people who do NOTHING that is bad but I find that if you are the kind of person who does things then you will find yourself around inactive people less and less over time.
Couch potatoes seem to attract one another and repel everyone else.
It even takes a certain kind of slacking, in a sense, to read lots of random Wikipedia articles, keep up with current events, browse arXiv papers not directly on the topic of your current work, keep up with recent music, etc. Arguably reading a lot is not really slacking. But maybe keeping up with recent musical trends is? Seems all quite subjective, unless you literally are doing nothing.
I tend to see it more as different thought/work styles along several axes. For example, on a question of dabbling in side projects, for some people it'd be good advice to suggest laying off and concentrating more on one thing, while for others, encouraging a bunch of side projects is exactly the right advice. Some people need to do less random-walk reading, while maybe others need to do more...
I think we measure ourselves against our peer group and the more slackers we hang around the more mediocrity seems like success.
The fact that you can be insanely productive in short bursts of time while taking breaks in between should not be underestimated.
you certainly don't need to be around productive people to be productive.
Modest progress; I'll push it earlier next year
"You are the average of your 3 closest friends"
Pick your friends wisely.