The Worlds Left to Conquer | Hacker News Reader

The Worlds Left to Conquer

ludic.mataroa.blog

31 pointspards6 comments

This reminds me a bit of dating advice given by an attractive person, except it is work performance advice given by a (probably) unusually intelligent and socially capable person.

It is true that most corporations are riddled with less-competent individuals (around half below average, strange to say). But that is expected and generally doesn't matter; corporations are built on the assumption their employees and managers are average. The competition is also made up of average workers and managers [0]. But the junior and senior managers are embedded in a web of relationships and connections and that is generally their value proposition to the company.

So the riddle is not identifying that nobody knows what they are doing, which is easy and obvious, but quickly identifying what can be done technically and then selling it in a way that befuddled management simultaneously agree with and don't feel threatened by. It is not easy, it requires treading a very precise thread of social decisions. It is such a rare combination that when someone turns up who can do that they are justifiably going to be paid absurd amounts of money.

Society is built by a small number of serial overachievers. I expect they do spend most of their time confused why everyone else keeps making obvious mistakes and getting predictably bad outcomes.

[0] Breaking this assumption is where I expect the big gains from AI to come from in the corporate world.

That's an interesting analysis. I wonder if that could also be some useful advice for evaluating companies: Don't only look at the individuals, but also how the company is organized and how the individuals are put in relationship to each other. I.e. what kind of exchanges and work relationships are encouraged, possible, discouraged or effectively impossible inside the company.

> Society is built by a small number of serial overachievers.

I think that's true in a sense but also needs qualification: People can be overarchievers in some fields, average in other fields and underachievers in yet other fields. Not all fields are relevant for one's career of course, but I'd be surprised if there was an absolute order where some people being strictly better at everything than most others.

They're often polymaths - generalists who are very competent across the fields they touch on but not necessarily the best. It is their ability to reach across multiple fields simultaneously or bring together experts in those fields that you see great things occur.

This is exactly what I thought when I was reading it - I am sure he is a nice guy but him saying anyone could do what he did if they just had a go-getter attitude and read a book on humanities is completely ignorant of his natural talent and good luck. this is a guy who got into Stanford as a Math major - am I supposed to think I or any other random guy could do that? This guy is humble bragging but I am also very sensitive!

"I won at everything and it wasn't even hard!" - this author

Congratulations! I'm quite intrigued that you're finding the consultancy is going quite so well.

> I was unable to put clients on both Evidence and Prefect because the former failed to attend a sales meeting booked through their website and the latter failed to book a meeting after the ex-real estate agent they hired failed to actually schedule a meeting following outreach also through their website.

> the people I tried in Melbourne don’t check their sales inbox.

> because the firms I initially tried also don’t respond to their sales inbox.

> I cannot state this clearly enough – the bar is so low that it is hard to give people money.

It's amazing how frequently I encounter this phenomenon. I do the homework, choose a provider based on my research, reach out to the provider, and ... crickets.

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