Something I've noticed about the rich and powerful | Hacker News Reader

Something I've noticed about the rich and powerful

dustincurtis.com

44 pointsrms42 comments

"They all seem to be extremely (in some cases obsessively) curious about why they, in particular, have been successful. It seems almost as though they feel undeserving, as if the rest of their lives have been an attempt to prove their first success had a reason or formula."

You find the same thing if you talk to successful people in any field, once they get to talking shop. E.g. a successful playwright will be very curious about what drove his first big success. Not (necessarily) because he feels unworthy, but because he wants to write more successful plays.

The curiosity of the successful about success at whatever they've been working on is practically universal. It's partly cause and partly effect.

That's interesting. The reason I wrote a post about it, though, is because it seems somewhat disturbing/alarming to me. I think many first time startup founders have a very visceral, almost animal-like feeling that if they make it big and become a multimillionaire, their problems will be solved and they will have won the game.

It doesn't appear this is the case though. In fact, some of the people I have met have told me they felt worse after succeeding the first time. To quote one of them, who said he got bored:

"I actually learned this lesson even before I had any disposable income by playing the Sims. I cheated and had loads of cash. Made my house amazing, etc. But everybody was still unhappy and there was nothing left to do in the game."

It's good to see the post below by lionhearted, but I get the feeling that isn't a common occurrence.

(Solving the money problem) != (solving all my problems)

Successful startups generally solve the money problem. That's all, nothing else.

Solving the money problem doesn't solve loneliness. It doesn't keep you warm at night or fix problems with a messed up family situation, etc...

But, once you've solved the money problem, you tend to have more time on your hands to focus on other problems.

Solving the money problem will keep you warm at night, assuming you pay your heating bill...

(And if you've got a messed-up family situation, money can put some serious (geographical) distance between you. :)

Maybe he was referring to a bed warmer (wink wink).

It's an inside/outside effect. From the outside, business success / influential job / speaking at conferences / being a published author / whatever looks glamorous and amazing, if not a little touched by destiny.

Then you get in there and realize it's full of regular people who are petty, short-sighted, don't work very hard, make mistakes, have personal issues, got where they were with lots of luck, and so on. Just like you. And it doesn't really change your life that much. From the inside, it's not nearly so amazing as it seemed to the outsider you were.

But while disillusioned you is no longer an outsider, there are tons of other outsiders remaining, gazing at you the way you once gazed at your now-equals -- and because you now know that this jealousy/esteem/worship/whatever is unfounded, you feel unworthy of these emotions directed at you and seek to justify or earn them.

It's kinda like finding out that the hero you idolize is in fact an alcoholic and kicks his cat, only that hero is you.

Taken to extremes, this totally normal phenomenon becomes a psychological condition called "imposter syndrome."

This is true even on the micro level of HN karma points. I find myself wondering why certain comments or submissions get voted way up more than others. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that our brains evolved to discover relationships so we have this innate drive to explain and prove what we experience so that we can replicate it as we feel our survival depends on our ability to do so.

I agree the curiosity of the successful about success is fairly universal, perhaps however there is more of an 'introspection' industry due to the democratisation of success - in other words, more people want to know why/how you were successful, and this in-turn can create a vicious cycle in which the creator/artist/achiever spends too much effort on the act of recreating something achieved before, and in turn producing a parody of their former work (I see Joseph Heller's post Catch-22 work as an example of this). The issue of 'writers block' wasn't so pressing in early modern society - Shakespeare had to write more successful plays to make a living, to that extent I think playwrights envisioned their careers as the art of learning a craft: Shakespeare could not be considered a creative 'genius' until a long time after, once the concept of an individual genius had taken root.

Have you ever heard people like Marty Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino talk about what makes a good movie? I'm sure you've watched any number of shows on VH1, where bands talk about what makes a good rock or pop song great. It's why Annie Dillard wrote The Writing Life. Hang around novelists or genre fiction writers, and you'll start to hear about what makes a novel great, story arcs,etc...

They talk like that because you want them to.

These people are defined by their success. Audiences want to hear about it, often looking for insights. For obvious reasons nobody knows exactly what they did right and thus end up sounding as if in doubt, not least because they don't want to sound pompous.

So when you listen to tech millionaire turned hacker Ben Bitdiddle, unless (A) you insist he talk about his surfboarding experiences or (B) Ben doesn't mind coming through to you as an egomaniac, the observation described here is very much expected.

> nobody knows exactly what they did right

I think pg knows pretty much what he did right, and has explained it to us.

but tell me why failure rate still so high?

Because 'doing it right' means going from a 90% failure rate to a 60% failure rate.

Because the method is explained, but not the exact path. There is a process to follow to help you make something people want, but no way of knowing what people want without trying.

Because building viaweb again, the same way, wouldn't make any money. You have to do something a little different than pg did.

This is why modeling your behavior after a particularly successful figurehead is of dubious value. It's very, very difficult to go back and explain why things worked out the way they did. Bill Gates made some brilliantly forward-thinking strategy decisions for his OS, did it at exactly the right time, and became a billionaire. Had a butterfly farted in an IBM exec's ear early in the process, things could have turned out completely differently.

"Regardless of what level of success they may have achieved in their chosen field of work or study or what external proof they may have of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced internally they do not deserve the success they have achieved and are actually frauds. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they were more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

But most of success (especially at the upper echelon) is due to luck & timing; I don't know if that's a true syndrome.

It's even worse when the person who had the luck/timing in a previous success sets out to recreate that success and doesn't adjust to the changes that have occurred since. At least one such startup I've worked at the CEO had what we referred to as "Delusional Rich Guy Syndrome". Many of the investors he teamed up with also shared the same disease.

It's the idea that somehow, all the other people that failed lacked their special innate abilities so this time it will be different.

Also, consider that ability is distributed more or less on a bell curve. Effort... I don't know, but you can't work that much more than the average for that long, so bell-curveish, again. However, in modern society, rewards can be way, way outside the bell curve. Not that that's a bad thing, or illogical - a new invention that makes millions of people's lives better is worth a lot of money and should be rewarded - however, maybe it's one of the reasons that people are a bit suspicious of extreme wealth.

That's true, though I would guess that for the upper echelon success you need all: luck, timing, intelligence, competence, etc.

"Syndrome" just means this is a common pattern for successful people (independent of whether they are right or not about the role of external factors to their success).

For example, from the article about entrepreneurs and impostor syndrome (linked from the Wikipedia entry):

"Psychological research done in the early 1980s estimated that two out of five successful people consider themselves frauds".

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20060901/handson-leadership.html

I think the problem is that these people are not willing to accept that luck had a great deal to do with their success. Instead of worrying that they are not truly the master of their own universe, they should accept the fact and be thankful for what they have. I think they should feel an obligation to 'give back' to those who are less fortunate, because there are others out there who have worked just as hard and just didn't get lucky. The truly classy rich people all seem to get this.

I think this is part of a theme mentioned in one of pg's talks, namely that people still have it ingrained in their psychic that getting lots of money can only be done via fraudulent means (since for such a long time that was more or less the case).

Is there a link between high achievers and boredom? I get a rush when something comes together, but afterwards comes the inevitable deflation - what then?

I actually get bored well before something comes together... as soon as I can see the solution, it takes quite a bit of discipline to actually execute it. Since I haven't yet highly achieved, I'd say that if there's such a link, it's to a sweet spot rather than "more easily bored -> more acheivement".

Are you by any chance an INTP? What you describe is a strong indicator for that personality type.

http://www.intp.org/intprofile.html

"The drive to understand things that are not yet understood is a very powerful force in the life of an INTP. Where the Ti preference is strong, this drive can override the experiential element so strongly that the INTP will become quickly bored with anything that he has successfully analysed to the point of understanding it. Once understood, it has nothing left to offer, once the satisfaction which comes with achieving the goal of understanding diminishes."

Thanks, that explains a lot for me. I've slowly come to realize this is my problem, and have been surrounding myself with "finishers". It's akin to running a race, where you are always told to run through the finish, but once you see it, there is little drive to continue.

In other words, the chase is more fun than the kill. Yep that's me, although I see that kind of activity all around me - I'm not sure if I want to 'understand' something so much as experience it, and to that extent I think my ability to get bored has been facilitated by a culture which values the novel and the new. But this makes sense in high economic growth societies - your consumers need short attention spans if you want to keep selling them stuff.

INTJs are like that too, but they see the whole picture and still want to push the product to completion. Contrary to INTPs, they are not satisfied with just solving the technical problem, they want some elegant closure as a whole through deployment. But they still have a hard time completing those last little tasks to cross the finish line, because it's already crossed in their head through their vision.

Incidentally, readers might think that this is psychobabble, but as an ENFP with ENTP/INTP tendencies, I've continually struggled with starting projects that I never finished. Then I met my cofounder. He's INTJ/ENTJ. In our working relationship, he's continually pushing towards completion. The amazing thing is that then completion actually happens! It's wonderful!

Yes, I am, actually. Not sure if I'd noticed that I fit that trait of INTPs so well, though. :)

Heh,I didn't even feel like finishing the quote.

I really need to get a handle on that.

Very true for me personally. I built a small company with a partner that was doing low-six figures annually. I bought him out and was running the show. And on a weekly basis, I was scared to death that it was luck, a fluke, that I couldn't replicate it if it all fell apart.

It made me shake in my boots, be overly cautious. What if it was just dumb luck? What if the wheels came off? When I set down to put my second company together, and it succeeded, it was like a huge weight off my shoulders. It's like - okay, you drop me in a foreign country without speaking the local language, clothes on my back, and $20 in my pocket, and I'll be back within a couple years.

I can't say exactly what it is, but I think the idea of having something you don't "deserve" (or couldn't get back) is fundamentally really scary to people. You see the same pattern with people dating someone they perceive out of their league, and you especially see it with corrupt political leaders. For me, not knowing if I'd made it or gotten lucky would haunt me on perhaps a weekly basis until I did it again.

And now? If everything melted down, I'd go hang out on the beach and read some books for a bit, then jump back in the saddle after I got sick of reading or beachlaying. It's a much better feeling than wondering if it was dumb luck.

I never understood this. I mean it's a beautiful outlook, but every time I hear people "jumping back into starting companies," it's totally confusing. To me, making that statement is akin to I'm going to walk across the room and figure out why when I get there.

I probably just don't "get" it. Maybe one day. Hopefully.

What is your business? Just curious.

Off-Topic:

I like the way his articles are setup. Definitely one of the most aesthetically pleasing websites I've visited in a long time. And each page is customized...

Mildly off-topic, but nice typography.

The page design is both inspirational, and raises the bar frighteningly high.

I agree, the design for these pages are all excellent.

When, after many attempts, I wrote the first SF&F story that I thought might be saleable, I decided that I wasn't going to try publishing it until I could write what I thought were good stories on a routine basis. I didn't ever want to be a one-hit wonder, even to the extent of only having one published SF&F story.

you ever notice how people who save others and are interviewed afterward are so humble? "oh no, I'm not a hero. I just did what anyone would do" after pulling babies from a house fire or something. Now I know they do this partly because it is expected. But screw that. If I ever do something that is widely recognized I will be just like Mike Tyson on the subject. "Thank you for the acclaim that I've always known I deserve! You should all feel grateful to be in the same room of someone as awesome as me!"

This might be part of the reason that I won't be successful. My personality type does not often become successful (at least not wildly so).

Go read Gladwell's Outliers. It explains all this.

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