Self-examination is the Secret Ingredient for Success | Hacker News Reader

Self-examination is the Secret Ingredient for Success

nytimes.com

128 pointsfleaflicker36 comments

The anecdotes here could be used to justify a range of different theories:

'Being Daring is the Secret Ingredient for Success'; 'Innovation is the Secret Ingredient for Success'; 'Not Giving Up is the Secret Ingredient for Success' 'Giving People What They Don't Know They Want is the Secret Ingredient for Success'

and so on... Can I have my book deal now?

EDIT: I'd also like to use this opportunity to invent the new verb "to Gladwell", which is to make up a spurious set of keys to success using the flimsiest of anecdotes. Hence my next book - 'Learning How to Gladwell is the Secret Ingredient for Success'

Malcolm Gladwell, who has said in an interview that he writes to try out ideas,

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html

"Q: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?

"A: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke them."

is good, while trying out ideas, at crediting his sources. Any reader of a Malcolm Gladwell book (as I know, from being a reader of the book Outliers) can check the sources, and decide from there what other sources to check and what other ideas to play with. Gladwell doesn't purport to write textbooks, but I give him a lot of credit for finding interesting scholarly sources that haven't had enough attention in the popular literature. He is equaled by very few authors as a story-teller who can tie ideas together in a thought-provoking assembly.

The problem with Gladwell is that many or most of the anecdotes he uses have been used by others to draw different conclusions (how many times have you read about the Tenerife disaster for example?)

I don't think Gladwell pretends to be doing science, but what he does is worse than "non-science", it's a kind of charlatanism. He builds a thesis and then hand-picks anecdotes to fit his preconceived narrative.

That's how chain-letters are made. (And his talent as a writer makes it worse.)

Even the "research" cited is dubious:

"The successful people we spoke with — in business, entertainment, sports and the arts — all had similar responses when faced with obstacles: they subjected themselves to fairly merciless self-examination that prompted reinvention of their goals and the methods by which they endeavored to acheive them."

100% of successful people subjected themselves to merciless self-examination? A 100% result usually indicates a small sample size or a meaningless conclusion. Nor is this a particularly useful fact without knowing what % of unsuccessful people self-examine themselves constantly.

It's hard to knock the article's premise though, even if the author has provided little evidence to support it: Frequent self-examination seems like a good thing.

I believe that honest and accurate self-examination is easier said than done, though.

I'd also like to use this opportunity to invent the new verb "to Gladwell",[...]

Too late: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3044462

I don't know whether it's the secret to success, but among startups we've funded the lack of it is almost perfectly correlated with failure.

The article seemed to be referring to dramatic moments of self-assessment when people fundamentally transformed themselves or their businesses. In a startup, I would think that you typically do this many times before finding the winning formula. Does anyone have insight into how often it is practical and useful to do a dramatic re-imagining of the fundamentals of your business? I'm guessing there is such a thing as pivoting too much or too often.

Certainly, I think it is important to practice self-awareness and self-assessment on a daily basis, but there are no shortage of good ideas on a strong startup team. Every few days someone has a great new idea that could be transformative, and from my experience, you try to question yourselves and your assumptions all the time (hopefully in as brutally honest a way as is necessary, though you sometimes wonder if you are fooling yourselves). Perhaps reality is simply more incremental, though it can look dramatic and transformative after the fact. Every sprint planning meeting and every board meeting is an opportunity for rigorous assessment. You just have to work hard to maintain self-awareness, to see things from a truly unique perspective and make big changes when necessary. Outside advisers certainly help. Otherwise, we are human after all, and it is easy to fool ourselves.

If the lack of it is almost perfectly correlated with failure, then wouldn't having it be almost perfectly correlated with success?

I didn't want to phrase that statement too strongly because there are more degrees of success than failure. It may be that avoiding denial is enough to avoid failure, but that to be a big success you need other things as well, like being smart or being in a hot market.

The vast majority of violent criminals in the USA are male, but the majority of males are not violent criminals.

And yet being male still almost perfectly correlates with being a violent criminal. asdfologist probably picks on a loose use of word "correlation", correlation is by definition symmetric. pg is really talking about conditional probabilities, but honestly I think everyone understands what he means.

You're right-I was also thinking of conditional probabilities. I appreciate the correction-I'm trying to learn to be more precise.

I did interpret it to be symmetric, but now that I think about it you seem to be right that colloquially it does (generally) refer to conditional probability. I disagree though that everyone interprets it that way, based on the upvotes my comment got.

Self examination in this case would be a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Not if more people have this trait than are successful.

Talking about startups, does this just mean keeping your eyes on your numbers and doing frequent review or are we talking about something on a more personal level?

I think by definition, self-awareness means something on a more personal level. You have to understand not only the market you're in, the business you're trying to start, your product and your customers, but also must be keenly attuned to your own methods, your "chemistry" with your partners, and the _way_ you approach the business, not just the approach itself.

At least that's been my experience as a self-proclaimed "self-aware entrepreneur" ;)

Actual introspection; metrics can help with that, but they're a very small part of the whole story.

This is something that I've struggled with my entire life - how to be honest with myself about what my shortcomings are and how to overcome them.

For me at least, it's been incredibly difficult and at times impossible. I've come to believe that there is something deeply rooted inside the human psyche that refuses to completely accept that we are imperfect.

Of course this isn't always unwanted. If we didn't have a certain amount of pure egotistical madness, how else would we attempt our dreams? The real trick is to figure out what parts you'll have to have help with in order to get there instead of blindly believing we can do it all.

This is probably why YC is so fixated on funding partners. You need someone with a very high level of self-awareness to be able to tackle the challenge on their own. I suspect that those individuals are fairly rare.

If it were just about building and doing things in a social vacuum, and you can accept the risks of what you're doing without becoming paralyzed, there should be no real downside to having a completely realistic feeling for your own limits.

Here is the problem. In our business culture, if you are pitching to sell products, get funding or get hired, then you can't export the products of your realistic introspection. This is not effective. No one wants to hear it. And you will be despised: if you say tepid things about yourself, people will imagine even worse about you, and your competitors will easily make use of this. So whether you are delusional about yourself or not, you have to export a delusionally rosy picture of who you are and what you are doing.

If we want to stop incentivizing this, we can. But we don't.

I believe this is why artists tend to be more self-critical. They aren't making money(mostly) and so they're relatively free to consciously acknowledge their limits. The boundaries, when they're encountered, tend to come from social forces rather than market forces.

Similarly, a recurring phenomenon of financially successful artists is that they discard their old perspective and make work without the inspiration that powered their breakthrough.

> something deeply rooted inside the human psyche that refuses to completely accept that we are imperfect

I'm an atheist, but I've always been struck by how almost all successful human societies have an idea of god(s). I think it must confer some benefit. One of those benefits is a receptacle/personification for all the things we don't know/can't do - and a handle for all our ideals realised. Hence, the possibility of humility, not to another human "alpha male", but to something that, as mortals, we simply can't compete with. So the greeks had all these tragedies about hubris and nemesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(mythology)

Perhaps having a "god" as a label is psychologically easier to grasp than the nebulous and infinite "unknown".

Hey, I like that thought. I can see where that would be an evolutionary benefit as it would provide a ready made "There's always someone bigger" scapegoat.

Your idea could also partially explain why quite a few religions have a huge problem with Atheism. It can leave them lacking when compared to others, for instance "If Joe can do that without even believing in God, why can't I do it when he's on my side?"

"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." -- Thomas Edison

"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur

"Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly." -- Alexander Hamilton

"What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it." -- Doris Lessing

Tenacity and study are certainly important in achieving your goals, but self-examination is crucial in determining if those goals are indeed worthwhile.

Indeed, as Socrates said, "the unexamined life is not worth living." And "know thyself" was the inscription over the temple at Delphi.

It's not self-examination, it's taking action based on that self-examination, which is much more difficult to do...

Most people don't want to face their shortcomings, but of those who do, even fewer actually take the action necessary for success...

I started meditating consistently a few months ago, and it has led to some huge breakthroughs for myself. I can't recommend meditation enough as a way to take a step back from the hurried need to do something, and to really think deeply on every aspect of your approach.

Shameless self promotion:

I was measuring my meditation with an Arduino for the first 3 months and built a meditation app to help people get started meditating. If you have a Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor, the app also tracks your heart rate variance to let you know when you've entered a meditative state.

buddhamindapp.com

"People who are right a lot often change their minds"--Jeff Bezos It seems this is a corollary of the principle of self examination.

There's certainly some personality trait (e.g. intelligence/experience) that's more fundamental than a propensity for self examination. Not sure what it is...but it's the difference between knowing when to stick to something and knowing when to draw the opposite conclusions from your self-examination.

The world is full of successful narcissists and psychopaths. Not the most introspective types, so how do they do it? A better predictor for successfulness is how successful your parents was. That is the only theory I know of that can explain how George W Bush became president.

Ray Dalio, the founder of the investment firm Bridgewater Associates includes self-examination, honesty and introspection as one of the key ingredients in getting what you want from life.

I take the article as another datapoint to support his theory.

A good read: http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...

This is just yet another thing computers / AI will be better than humans at.

... So you need to know what you're doing wrong in order to do something right. Groundbreaking.

If you're already stopping to think what you're doing wrong, you're probably already on the right track, and this article might be a bit basic for you :)

Some people can be surprisingly unwilling to even imagine that they're doing anything wrong at all. They routinely assume that difficulties they encounter are the product of external factors, and never stop to even wonder whether the cause is their own sub-optimal decisions.

It's more subtle than that. You need to know _why_ you're doing things wrong - what's motivating you, what's preventing you from improving, what conceptions (or misconceptions) you have.

As pg said, having self-awareness isn't necessarily a recipe for success, but a lot of failures come from a refusal to see the reality of the path you're on.

Omg, I knew there was a secret ingredient!

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