Scott Adams: How to Be Successful | Hacker News Reader

Scott Adams: How to Be Successful

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690 pointscodelion184 comments

This insight is huge:

  Had I been goal-oriented instead of system-oriented, I imagine I would
  have given up after the first several failures. It would have felt like 
  banging my head against a brick wall.

  But being systems-oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every
  day, no matter the fate of the project that I happened to be working on.

Truth right here. His systems thinking advice is phenomenal. Love this quote too:

"Throughout my career I've had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways."

He's talking about success as simply a single point in the statistical sampling that is your life. This is an extremely correct, scientific, and most importantly helpful way to look at the world and your work.

It sounds good, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to apply it. I realize this article couldn't contain everything that will be in his book and so I hope that there is more practical advice regarding systems other than "have a system" in the book.

For example, the guy that was always looking for a new job... isn't that just a repeating goal?

On a personal note, I need to lose weight. I've done it before: I lost 74 lbs, but now several years later I've gained back just over 90 lbs. I reached my goal, and lost all motivation for eating healthy, and steadily gained it all back and more.

I'm trying to structure my life around doing healthier things (better food, more exercise). How can I systemize that? Or have I already? I have "goals" of walking X times per week for Y distance. Is that the wrong approach? Should it be "after having walked, walk again as soon as possible but not sooner than 1 day?"

I guess I could use an example of some systems that were not just repeating goals.

>>I guess I could use an example of some systems that were not just repeating goals.

Don't go to the gym or workout or eat good just because you want to lose weight. Do it as a habit. Be motivated by the good feeling you get post workout everyday, not because you want to lose 10lbs or bench 200... Don't weight yourself, don't set a "goal". Just go. five times a week. Just keep going. Find a running club, and run because it's a good way to hang out with friends twice a week. Play a sport. Eat vegetables. But don't force them down, experiment with ways to integrate them into tasty meals. Then keep playing with recipes, and suddenly you're eating super healthy just because it's fun to try cooking some crazy plant from the store and you're making all these cool dishes.

I'm guessing that a system is just a repeatable goal. So perhaps in your case, the repeatable goal wouldn't be to lose weight as that would invariably lead you to dying, but rather to do something that makes you healthier every day. That could be something like eating healthier everyday or exercising for 15 minutes. This way you shifting from the goal of being X pounds lighter, to a system of being healthy.

The beauty of a systems approach is that it takes vastly less willpower. It is very counter-intuitive to most people: "Gee, doing that every day, that sounds so hard. I can barely get exercise twice a week; therefore exercising every single day must be much harder." Nope. Quite the opposite.

Hard is deciding every day whether you feel like going for a walk by arguing with yourself over whether you will feel better afterwards. That is effort spent with no satisfying payoff.

True. As so often, Linux gives a great analogy. When you start using it chances are you find working with it pretty inefficient and many things seem hard.

But the more you learn about the system (which only really works when you do it every day)the better you get at solving your problems whereas people who rely solely on out-of-the box software improve rather little.

Make "going for a walk every day" the rule, not the exception.

Just go out and walk, don't think "I have to walk because I need to lose weight", do it as an habit.

You don't think "I need to wash my teeth because I don't want them to rot", or shower every day because "I don't want to smell".

We probably could avoid washing and brushing our teeth for a day, without ill effects. But we do it every day because it's so ingrained in our daily routine that our day does not feel complete if we skip it.

It's much harder to break a rule than to break an exception, and routine is much more powerful than willpower.

> But we do it every day

Wait, how long has this been going on? Do most people really take showers every day? Most people I know (myself included) only do it when they get smelly/sweaty, which is roughly every day in the summer, every 1.5-2 days in the winter. Is this a US thing?

Looked at some online polls, seems like 50% say once a day, 30% every other day and 20% something else.

When I was in Japan, I had to shower at least twice a day but in England I don't sweat quite as profusely.

I think there's a distinction between hygiene and social/cultural 'etiquette'. I will always make sure I am very clean before meeting someone, casual or otherwise.

Yes, in the USA, it is considered normal to take showers daily, at least with the middle class, and quite weird to not do so, to the point of being a major social impediment ("hey hippie, take a bath!").

Hmm, but how can they know? I mean, it's rare that your frequency of sweatiness coincides exactly with the daily cycle. Sometimes I can go three days without a shower, sometimes I have to shower twice in a day.

I guess this is one of those cultural things, and people just do it half because it's good sense and half because it's the custom.

It also depends on your body's details. For example, my hair gets so oily if I go 2 days without a shower. I need to shower every day just to feel like my hair feels clean. If I'm going to do my hair, might as well do the whole body. If I'm in a rush though, I won't necessarily soap up the whole body every day.

I also find a warm shower a pleasant way to wake up (and live in a locale where neither electricity nor water is scarce) - so it's a combination of sense, custom, and pleasure.

> Is this a US thing?

South African here. I shower daily, no matter the season (as does everyone I know). Sometimes another quick shower just before bed on a hot day.

I just don't feel clean otherwise. Climate accounts for the seasons, but we do it in cold-ish Winters as well.

I think "I brush my teeth so they don't rot" and "I need to shower because I don't want to smell" daily.

I appreciate the advice in the sibling posts.

I will consider these while I try to work out what the difference is between what Scott Adams calls a goal vs a system. I can be very pedantic, and I think that is getting in the way of understanding.

I googled "systems vs goals" and actually found another Scott Adams post on the topic, even about excercise :)

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/systems/

I'm trying to get a more direct handle on the difference so I can better apply it generally.

It seems that when Adams says "goal" he is specifically talking about an endpoint. A destination. And that's a common definition I think.

His use of system seems to still have goals, they are just smaller and easily achieved. They also seem to be more related to triggers or starting points. For example, "go to the gym" not "workout" or "do X reps."

He also provides a relief valve in this case (not having to work out once he gets there if he doesn't feel up to it), so that the pressure of the expected follow through to "going to the gym" is relieved and thus not a deterrent.

So if I were to apply this to walking, it could be something like "put on walking shoes, exercise clothes, and go outside, everyday."

Or for better food: "Go to the store, buy some veggies I like," and maybe add on "go through prep work for cooking them." The relief valve could be that "I don't have to cook and eat this for dinner, but i do have to buy and prep."

To lose or maintain weight, the system is really simple, for me at least. Don't eat too many calories, and make sure you do something in the form of exercise each day.

You need to be incredibly self conscious of approximately how many calories you're ingesting throughout the day (no, you don't have to weigh your food. Just a rough estimate). And you have to maintain this system forever, basically.

How you actually implement the system, such as specifics of what foods to eat, what form of exercise, etc., can wildly vary, but you need to always remember the fundamentals.

Right. Actually doing the exercise or actually eating the vegetables is at worse a minor nuisance, that on most days has enough immediate positives that it is self-reinforcing. Once we have the running shoes on, we probably find ourselves happy with the choice 30 minutes later some 99%+ of the time. Ditto the clean vegetables sitting on the counter.

The problem comes at the "meta" level, bargaining with ourselves whether we feel like going to the gym, so we hem and haw over putting the shorts and shoes on. Allowing this self-bargaining process to become involved is adding mostly negative emotional energy in a way that does not pay a useful dividend.

Presumably the relief valve has value in cutting short certain kinds of excuses. "Fine. If I am outside with my shoes and gear on, I do not have to go to the gym. Just getting the shoes on is easy enough, right? Once I am outside, maybe I will want to stroll around the block. But I can decide that once I am outside and ready -- no sense in dawdling now."

Read W. Edwards Deming, and learn statistics. Apply it to how you look at your life. Apply Deming to how you look at work, management, and other people.

Yes, it's pretty broad, and it's a neverending learning process. But become a systems thinker and you'll be able to see how the world works scientifically, instead of based on false personal opinions or narrow perspectives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Any advice on books to start with?

That's the problem, his books are dry and boring, but they are fascinating once you get into them. Start with Out of the Crisis -- a book basically about the concepts he used to bring Japan out of its post-WWII depression and into a world market power. He basically did that single-handedly, so that should give some weight to what he says.

The concepts are aimed at manufacturing, but they're more generally about management and how to create quality as a culture, not simply as a product. It's brilliant, but it clashes against most American business thinking in the last few generations (all about punishment, motivation, raises; basically about tuning the individual), so it largely goes ignored. It's also why you should listen to it, given that most American businesses in the last few generations basically suck.

Ignore his hokey names and lack of bedside manner. Pay special attention to his 14 points, and 7 deadly diseases. Think about everything in terms of statistics and process. Apply everything to your own business experiences, and you'll start to see how he's entirely right, and all your assumptions and everything you thought was true about business, manufacturing, quality, and especially people (your workers, your employees) are basically false. Turn it upside-down and start fresh with real science.

Systemic weight loss:

Find a thing you like doing that happens to involve a lot of body motion. Ideally, find multiple things, so that if one stops for whatever reason you're still doing the others. But it can be hard to find that kind of time and energy.

Walk/cycle whenever possible. (You may need to move if you live in the car-oriented suburbs.)

Start thinking of the entire world as a gym. See a low-hanging branch of a tree? Try doing some pull-ups.

If you want to lose weight think about your eating, not about your movements. Excericse is very ineffcient way to lose weight (but very good for other reasons).

I had personally been using thought process the author describes, before I read this article.

The way I would describe this is that my "goal" in life to improve my everyday habits, the way I work, the way I manage priorities, how I structure my lifestyle, the broad direction in which I am taking my career, the kind of people I am meeting and attracting in my life (which is a result of my overall lifestyle, priorities etc.) etc.

You constantly tweak these things to take your life in a broad direction that you want to take it towards.

As a few concrete examples, if you are not meeting enough women in your life, or the type you want, the answer is not to go out to a bar. The answer if to change your lifestyle in a fundamental way which makes meeting women of the type you want a natural outcome.

If you are not happy with your health, fitness etc. the answer is not necessarily (in this approach) to join a gym or hire a trainer for 3 months. It is to understand what makes a healthy lifestyle, slowly change your dietary habits, figure out an exercise scheme that makes sense for you, figure out how in your current lifestyle you can get plenty of sleep etc. Basically something that would make being healthy and fit a natural outcome.

A necessary condition for this to work is that because it is such a systemic approach, the system has to be congruent with your overall lifestyle, and you have to be happy with executing the system. This is a big reason, why I feel, most dietary plans, or hobbies don't pan out enough. It is very short term goal drives and not something which is seamlessly integrated in a systemic way in your life.

These are two examples where I have applied it (with a reasonable degree of success). I am using something similar for my overall work life, but whether it has succeeded or not is something I guess I will only know in another 10 years or so :)

I hope that answers your question.

You already have a system - you need to change it. Take a look at your eating habits.

Systems are habits

For weight loss, that's the key. Exercise will help, but the input calories is a much bigger factor.

If you are like most people I suspect you will find you snack a lot, and possibly drink softdrinks.

Monitor your calories (see the MyFitnessPal app/website) for 2 days, and I bet you'll find if you change your eating system to avoid those snacks and softdrinks you will lose weight.

I recently began an app that might help with this. It's laughably primitive right now, but it does help me personally. You can download it and read a bit of the context at http://noisytyping.com/an-app-to-help-lose-weight-by-increas... (OS X only).

Hmm, I find it extraordinarily bizarre. My life has been filled with people charging down the wrong path because they have elevated system/process over goals.

For example: Agile/Yourdon/waterfall/XP/ISO9001/whatever. Our goal is a working system on time and budget (or whatever your goals are). The strategy is, perhaps, iterative waterfall, or agile, or more likely, some hybid approach (hint: how likely is small scale scrum to work to build a new Boeing, and how likely is the ideal Boeing process likely to create a great social web app). Systems are based on a number of assumptions about your goals; assumptions that may not apply, or that may change over time. If you aren't continually testing your chosen strategy (I prefer strategy over system, but I more or less mean the same thing here) against your goals, you are likely to be anywhere from sub-optimal to completely wrong.

So I live in a world where everyone is currently chasing Agile, without questioning whether it even fits the problem, or what its weaknesses are (even if it fits, it has weaknesses, and you should be aware of it so you can mitigate them). I live in a world where people grind through business processes, without questioning whether this is taking us where we actually need to go, or whether things have changed and our goals, which inform the system, still apply. To use the example in the article, it makes no sense to search for another job if you are retiring in a year. If the externals change and system does not, you are in trouble.

Good post, but I just want to point out that it hinges on your strategy = his system. The more comments I see, the more confused I am about what his definition of a system is.

I'm not sure I do either, but the first analogy that popped in my head when I read about Mr. Adams' approach was one of weight loss. I don't think it's a particularly good analogy, but it's the best I can come up with as an illustration of his "system-oriented" approach.

In a goal-oriented system, someone might choose to lose 30 pounds as their goal, then they'll work toward that goal through exercise or diet. Upon achieving it, they'll either continue (setting another goal) or fall off the wagon (going back to previous habits and gaining the weight right back). I've known enough people who have tried to diet repeatedly--and have succeeded in their weight loss--only to fail miserably and gain the weight back within a few weeks.

In a system-oriented approach (or maybe you could call it a habit-oriented system?), you focus on building up or improving your habits so that they meet whatever goals you set. Using the example of losing weight, you'd focus on diet and exercise by making fundamental lifestyle changes to your behavior and eating habits that simply happens to produce weight loss as a byproduct. People who exploit this system by changing their habits consistently keep the weight off because their day to day behavior has fundamentally changed. To put it another way, their habits would have to be dramatically altered in order to go back to putting on the weight they lost as a consequence of this approach.

Now, what I'm at a loss on is how this might apply to businesses, software development, or the likes other than to suggest it's a matter of developing good habits. To use his restaurant example: Instead of focusing on income goals, focus on making the best food in town and serving customers quickly. On second thought, maybe there isn't anything more to it other than habits? Maybe there's no "secret?" Develop good habits and plod along until something falls into your lap as a byproduct.

I think for software development, the system can be simple such as "I'm going to get a lot done every day." And then for each day, figure out what "a lot" means. When you finish a small goal, immediately reorient yourself to figure out the next goal.

I still think that's goal-oriented, or at the very least a hybrid approach. I wonder if the better term might be "objectives," e.g. each day, I have an objective to fix at least X bugs and make Y commits. But then that seems to increase the relative danger of encouraging yourself to do more make-work just to reach some slated goal at the end of the day.

That does give me some insight. To translate this to a habit-oriented system, you could improve or streamline your commit process, reorganize things to deal more readily with possible distractions (or deal with distractions in a single chunk of the day, such as the morning, to leave more time available for coding in the afternoon), and work on honing your habits. By doing so, getting certain goals done each day--and increasing the number of goals reached--would be a side effect of improved habits.

I guess I've been stumped because I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective (and I'm not especially prone to insight). Dumping goals entirely and focusing on the tools and techniques to get there seems more pertinent than establishing some baseline to work toward for a tangible reward. In some ways, it's like the football team example: If the team focuses on improving their fitness and practice habits (making progression itself a habit, such as the mile run by 5 seconds every few days), their competitiveness will improve as a consequence and become more predictable.

Another analogy:

relativity theory (goal-oriented - macro solutions) vs quantum theory (system/process-oriented - micro solutions)

I like that one.

Agile/Yourdon/waterfall/XP/ISO9001/whatever - Are not systems, they might be processes. But that is a wrong term to define them. They best come into a thing called 'standardization' which is basically the art of reducing every one to a same measure to enable them to be managed easily.

>>So I live in a world where everyone is currently chasing Agile

No, Agile is only for people where incremental improvement is possible in exchange of super cheap failures. People in construction businesses, space technology, medical electronics, micro processors, aircraft industry and many others would run into expensive disasters if they choose agile.

Its perfectly possible to use Agile in those situations, and some do. You can't manage whole projects using agile, because it only works on small teams. For building a aircraft for example, you may have an agile team developing firmware for specific part of the plane.

You develop strict tests, implement it in an agile way, then only let it pass to next stage once those tests are okaying it. In fact that's how you should do agile.

Sure. And small part of a system != whole system. Anyway, kind of off the point of the OP, I got rant-y there.

It's a lot like playing poker. If you look at the results of a hand it's very likely you'll get the wrong idea of how you were supposed to play it. Even when you make the right play you still expect to lose some amount of time.

Or when you're buying stock, you might expect the stock to go up by 100 points 10% of the time and down by 3 points 90% of the time. Just because the stock lost 3 points doesn't mean you were wrong to buy it (you expect to make 7.3 points in the long run).

See also: Expected Value

I wish he could have given better examples of this phenomenally performant system-oriented mindset. I came away with more questions than answers, the biggest question being "why can't we substitute one extremely general term (system) with, say, an amalgam of three descriptive ones?"

Because then he might accidentally say something he would have to defend.

If he explained it all in the article, how could he sell his book?

I have been thinking about a similar approach for the past month or so (I call it the framework-oriented approach). There was an HN post in which a sports coach was quoted describing how a system consisting of good habits lead to consistent successes, as opposed to a goal-based approach that lead to non-consistent, one-off successes.

The idea is that you create a framework of good habits that keeps you focused on a task at hand, and that also forms as a mental safety-net in case of failure (thus, not pushing you off the wagon). Using a habitual process, you can make incremental progress overall (keep improving the framework) and you keep adding or removing features (goals) depending on the demands from your system. This is in contrast to having a goal-based approach where your entire framework is hinging on one goal/feature.

> For example, you often hear them say that you should "follow your passion." That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?

Related to this is a great book by Cal Newport "So Good They Can't Ignore You" (http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/145550912...) where he lays the case against "follow your passion" in a very methodical way. Here is a talk he gave at Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwOdU02SE0w

Story about the sports coach along with other similar ones are mentioned in the best-selling book, "The Power of Habit[1]", which is an excellent read describing exactly an example of what you have called the framework-oriented approach. Recommended.

1: http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-What-Business/dp/14000...

What about using goals as MVP's for frameworks/systems?

For instance I recently decided to read an academic paper every week. It is posed as a challenge, but if the results are good I will simply continue reading an academic paper every week and voila, a system.

I've used a similar approach for pretty much every good habit I keep. Start with a goal, then just don't stop. This has worked for everything from working out 3 times a day, to writing and programming.

Start with a goal, end up with a system.

Your idea is good (52 papers a week).

Let me give you a tip to increase your luck.

Put some more info about you on your site.

I'm not seeing it.

If it's there it's to hard to find.

Important people might stop by and think "who is this guy and what can he do for me". There is no way to know what exactly you know or are good at. Make it easy for people to connect or bring opportunity to you.

Be more like Dan Shipper.

( see http://danshipper.com/ I don't know him but I know who he is and what he can do ..)

SWIZECCCCCCC!!!!

Also: "In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success"

Wow, that's great...this is exactly how I feel. In the last year, I spent much less time thinking about the cool projects I wanted to build, and much more time learning all the things I've skipped: testing frameworks, devops, command-line toolsets...even just how to properly organize a codebase.

It's been far, far more rewarding...Projects that I wanted to do a year ago seem so trivial now...I can't overstate how much of an impact making the development process easier and less of a strain on your real life can really pay off...being able to accomplish bigger goals with better results ends up being a very nice side effect

This is in line with thinking of startups as a career: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/are-you-in-a-sta...

This is the reason I love the app Lift so much. It has literally changed my life.

You setup daily habits and it encourages you to keep doing those habits every day.

This sounds a lot like the message from the book "MindSet" by Carol Dweck.

Her premise is people have a "fixed" mindset or a "growth" mindset. (I'm not sure of the terms; the book isn't here with me.) The main difference is the growth mindset sees everything as a learning opportunity (like Adams talking about putting the manure in a garden and hoping the cows come back) whereas the fixed mindset sees everything as a test of ones abilities.

That's my experience.

When I was first trying to raise money on Broadway the number of times I failed was astronomical.

Being consistent and just going out there and continuing to ask and learn from my experiences is what got me through.

I can't stress this enough: Consistent effort creates data that you can use to improve and can help you find what works.

This is basically an idea that you shouldn't set goals on outcomes but on behaviors. The idea isn't new and is kind of mantra in some fields. One very specific one: professional gambling. This is good example because professionals gamblers have very long and imprecise feedback loop and setting goals on outcomes is recipe for constant frustration and confusion (sometimes you make great decision for 2 weeks and lose and sometimes you make awful decisions for 2 weeks and win big). Also for them it's easy to understand that outcomes are very poor indicator of good behavior. At least in "short term" but in many games the short term is sometimes several months or more. That is way more than our brain comprehends and you really have to fight its tendency to link value of behaviors with instant outcomes they produce (how intuition but also superstition is formed).

People without gambling background often have different view on reality - it's not so easy for them to appreciate luck because they are not trained to recognize it and not trained to deal with it in methodological way. I love the take on those issues by the author. As someone who did professional gambling for many years I see the concepts popular in my field worded in "real life"/business terms. Great !

I like this analogy. In a somewhat cheesy way, life is a casino, and the big winners are lucky idiots and pro gamblers. You can't choose to become a lucky idiot, but you can choose to become a pro gambler.

This is one of the best article I have read in weeks.

Life is about "karma" and not associating you to the results. Mr. Linus Torvalds never made a "goal" to make linux run in every server on this planet. I don't know what is his real inspiration behind working on Linux, But one thing is clear that he succeeded. Everybody has his own reason to follow his/her path.

Sometimes we don't even have a reason. We just go with the flow and keep learning what life gives us. Just by keeping our direction right in the flow, we will eventually reach our "goal". If we keep looking at the goals, we will never be able to look at our rocky path and eventually fall down. Making goals is wise. But sticking yourself to its result isn't.

Every work we do is our karma. Writing this is also a karma. I'm not talking about HN "karma", but real karma. It is about sharing my views with the community. I learn from the community, so maybe someone will learn from me. This is how community works. Thats my karma.

The word karma gained popularity from this famous verse of Bhagavad Gita :

karmany evadhikaras te ma phalesu kadachana ma karma-phala-hetur bhur ma te sango ’stv akarmani

It means :

You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.

I am just gonna conclude this with board that I recently saw in Apple's recent iPhone event.

http://oi44.tinypic.com/2uqd3es.jpg

The problem with "grinders" and taking the passion out of business is that it implicitly encourages amorality. One of the biggest reasons that Google's "don't be evil" mantra gets so much play is because it is so rare for a modern corporation to even acknowledge the concept of morality, much less explicitly name it as a goal even if the execution is imperfect.

I think moral behavior can only come from passion. If you don't have strong beliefs about the role of your business in society then it is entirely too easy to rationalize socially destructive practices in pursuit of financial success.

I'm not saying passion is a cure-all, there is no such thing as a cure-all and it is clearly possible to be passionate about a socially destructive idea. But from a social perspective, I think we are better off with a lot of passionate failures and a few passionate successes than a lot of purely financial successes.

Wait, don't public corporations have an fiduciary duty to their shareholders, debt duty to their bond holders and payroll obligation to their employees.

To be honest, if I was a shareholder of GOOG or more likely the via fund manager of my 401K who is managing a portfolio of thousands of publicly traded companies, I could care hardly less about the company and more about their bottom-line; because the fund manager has a moral responsibility to manage the assets of the little guys /working class/teachers/firefighters - cue the TIAA-CREF feel good commercial.

IMO, this is the true banality of evil that is not talked about. There is no invisible evil man pulling the strings behind the scene, only layers of our self-interest all conveniently shielded by complex layers of capital structures and financial incentives that no one wishes to really confront the conflicts and zero-sum nature involved in it all.

I could hardly care less about corporations trying to be 'not evil' because that's a marketing gimmick. I'd rather have a company tell me how they are screwing honestly their customers, employees and shareholders; there's no shame in that because it's a given and the company would instantly gain respect for their honesty.

Wait, don't public corporations have an fiduciary duty to their shareholders, debt duty to their bond holders and payroll obligation to their employees.

Sort of. It sounds good on paper - in a perfect world perhaps the invisible hand of the market would make "greed is good" a functional philosophy. But that's not the world we live in - there will always be significant friction, imperfect knowledge, etc in the market such that insisting that one part of the entire system be "pure" in the economic liberal sense is really just denying the obvious in a way that encourages exploiting those imperfections.

FWIW, the concept that corporations have no public duty beyond maximizing profits as a course of business is quite new. Here's some background:

False Profits: Reviving the Corporation's Public Purpose http://www.uclalawreview.org/?p=1056

You ignore that "don't be evil" can be a competitive advantage. Certainly, it was premised to be in many of the texts that form the foundation of laissez-faire capitalism (Adam Smith, who coined the invisible hand, most notably).

Focusing on the bottom line to the exclusion of all else also tends to encourage static short term thinking that leaves businesses unprepared for a changing market. A good long term investment is more than just a currently decent dividend.

Don't amoral people have passion, too?

"and it is clearly possible to be passionate about a socially destructive idea"

It can be the other way around too. What if you feel so strongly about your company's role in society that you rationalize socially destructive practices in pursuit of attaining/maintaining that role?

I doubt passion for business has much to do with morality. Simply being mature and having a bit of empathy is enough.

Moral behavior is basically antithetical to passion; it is a concept we've invented via reason, it has no meaning outside rationality. If you're making a moral judgment, you're being reasonable, not passionate.

Also you've failed to give any evidence for your hunch that 'grinding' in business implicitly encourages amorality. As far as I can tell there's absolutely nothing necessitating this, you've just made it up.

I'm not talking about passion in general, I'm talking about passion for the results of your work. Do you work solely to get rich, or do you work to create something that others will appreciate and benefit from? Do you have pride in your work beyond the effort you put in and renumeration you receive?

If you work solely to make a buck, "grinding" as describe in the article, then you don't give a damn about the results of your work beyond the dollars it puts in your pocket. And that's pretty much the definition of being amoral.

All of these arguments for success implicitly appeal to our fear that we are not going to be able to have a good human experience if we don't have enough power over other people.

You can succeed and you can fail, but you cannot be a success or a failure. The entire problem is identifying too strongly with the outcome of your actions.

Incidentally, if you really commit to this worldview, then traditional motivators like guilt and money stop working. The transition period can be difficult; it's usually the crux of a mid-life crisis.

Beware generic advice about achieving success:

http://mustapha.svbtle.com/tfs

(This is just off HN frontpage)

Yes, this article falls well within those bounds, but I can't help but feel we'll never cease to encounter similar write-ups (or books, or videos, or lectures, or how-to guides).

I think the best thing we can do right now is educate one another to be mindful of the advice and guidance we encounter. It can be motivational to hear about another's success, but unless we're willing to find what works for ourselves, it's useless.

Regardless, Adams is a remarkably interesting person and hearing about his approach to success is on par with reading a really great biography. Entertaining at the very least, something to build-up personal momentum at best.

I completely agree :)

Success-styled self-help is a lot like the lottery. There are millions of analytical, intellectual, objective issues with each (e.g. YMMV, survival bias, terrible odds, etc.). What they have in common is they allow users to dream "what if" and have fun (e.g. "escape") with those dreams. Both advertise this fantastical thinking in terms of "how you can" -- either buy the lottery ticket or buy my book -- but they still mostly boil down to entertaining people with dreams.

And heck, I love dreaming as much as the next person and love articles (or his comics) like this for that very reason... but I don't get hung up on trying to predict whether the content is strictly perfect just as I can't predict whether a random number printed on cheap paper will be life-changing.

Your advise is just as generic :)

This is a great point.

Especially because as I read the article, I could tell the title was sensationalized to indicate that the article would tell you how to be successful.

I like the content of the article though. It was a thought provoking argument for a system based approach to motivation rather than a goal oriented approach. I also liked the autobiographical parts.

Its kind of sad to see that even people with something genuine to say need to dress it up to be generic so that they will get more exposure.

The article says just that! "Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire won't be helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps."

It says that to cover the fact he's still giving advise. The rich have been giving out advise to the poor forever. The one little act they alwys leave out is the amount of support they received along the way. It's always conviently left out.

He also mentioned what a huge role luck plays. I found the article's honesty refreshing personally.

It's interesting how different people define success.

It sounds like Mr. Adams defines success by how much money you have.

My definition of success is enough income to allow me to mostly ignore money[1] and instead can spend my days doing things that genuinely interest me, with people I genuinely like.

[1] eg not having to worry about working out which yoghurt is the best value for money at the supermarket, not being afraid to go to the doctors because I can't afford it, having enough saved up that if I want to take a few months off employment to do my own thing I can, stuff like that.

[1] Is the same definition as Scott's if you word it that way. That's millions of dollars before you can think that way.

I don't have millions or dollars (or even close) and I do think that way. All those examples were actually things I've done in the past.

Are you American? Is the American healthcare system so bad that you feel you need millions of dollars to survive it?

Or is it just that for you to be able to ignore money you need to have so much of it that you can snap purchase ferraris?

FWIW when I say don't think about money I mean for mundane every day things, like going to the supermarket or the doctors, or not being tied down to work a job you hate because you need need need that paycheck that comes every month.

I'm talking about flexibility, not the ability to buy everything you've ever wanted :-)

This statement really hits a chord with me.

"To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That's literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize that you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or to set new goals and re-enter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure."

I've always been taught that there are 3 people in the world:

1) People who live in the past

2) People who have a dream and stop having dreams when they achieve that dream

3) People who have dreams and set new dreams once they achieve their current dream

Opens up the eyes based on another person's perspective. I wonder if that goal oriented purpose of life, getting the bigger house, better car etc. is just part of how society measures success.

I remember talking to a car parking attendant, and it turned out he was the owner of the lot. Out of curiosity I asked him how much he made - he turned around and pointed at a few nearby lots which he also owned - and gave me a staggeringly large sum.

The dichotomy Adams presents is interesting, of passion versus making money. It's obvious really, but I never thought about it as explicitly. The battle between these two forces are evident all over the place. Taking gaming for instance. Freemium, addictive, social games versus indie games made with passion. One rakes in millions a day, the other may barely subsist a living. But I'd argue one is far more beneficial to the human experience than the other.

Speaking of Scott Adams' business ideas, I've always liked his "Rules for Filtering Out Bad Ideas":

http://filters.pen.io/

My favorite is #3: It doesn't matter how many people dislike an idea. All that matters is how many like it. So you should ignore the odd person who says, "Personally, I don't like the idea of an antigravity invention, so you probably ought to spend your time doing something more useful."

I would have phrased it as: Some good ideas will be viciously hated by a few/some/many, but it's still good if adored by some.

Plenty of people like segregation, the death penalty, imprisonment for drug use, add your own absurdity or dislike here.

Not trying to Godwin the thread, but really, like/dislikes are a terrible measure of the value of an idea.

If we were talking about "idea" in a totally general way, your point is fine. (I'd add astrology to your list.)

But I, and I'm pretty sure that Scott Adams also, were talking about business ideas; i.e., are there any people willing to pay for this product or service, and how badly do they need or desire it.

My business idea is to collect your social data and sell it to the highest bidder, in exchange for letting you play some free games.

Some people love that. I personally cannot then conclude that the business plan is 'good' (for what I consider a reasonable value of 'good' - certainly it will make me buckets of cash).

I would think it's rather obvious he's talking about ideas to be employed in your personal life or business, not political ideas.

> Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

I found that interesting.

That's because it goes against the common strategy of "do what you love". I experienced this personally. I had very little interest in marketing. however after I saw some success I started getting passionate about it.

I myself found it very interesting. But honestly, I disagree on this.

It is interesting, but I completely disagree. At least in my own case. I've worked on projects that I've not been passionate about ("This is gonna make me super rich!"), and I always end up throwing in the towel and moving on. Passion is what drives me to keep going when there's simply nothing else.

Yeah, the problem is, no matter how good you are at doing something, there is somebody somewhere who is just as good or maybe better at the same thing, and he or she likes it. That person will kick your ass if you follow Scott Adams's advice.

(Advice that he apparently learned from an anonymous lending officer at a bank that isn't around anymore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocker_National_Bank)

You assume the market all has the same taste: While McDonalds has cheap and fast food, sometimes I like a French meal.

My IT support business is "ok" but it thrives because we fill a need that isn't met by other that who are indeed more passionate and smarter than us.

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. -Scott Adams http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...

" I've worked on projects that I've not been passionate about ..... and I always end up throwing in the towel and moving on"

I've been there. And I have to say you'd be surprised how passionate you get when you get reinforced with money and something works. My guess is that had some of the projects you worked on hit in a satisfying way you would have found great joy and that would have made you more passionate.

It certainly doesn't work for everyone, I know people who own successful companies and still they're not that happy about having to run them.

In my experience people are usually far less passionate about making a bunch of money than they think they are (there are those who really are passionate about the abstract idea of making money or are truly passionate about some derived benefit- but they have to work a lot harder to avoid becoming an... unsavory person). We conflate our desire to generate and create value and wealth- which tends to be subjective at a deep level- with generating income.

Scott wrote for the perspective of success = money, appropriate for the publication and to some degree reflective of his personal passions, but I suspect that most HN users are more interested in the act of creation. Money / being rich remains a very, very powerful method of validation and obviously a primary source of "potential creation" and to a lesser degree freedom- but for at least "makers" it is a mistake to confuse it for a fulfilling passion.

But what if the project did make you super rich? You might find some interest, and could hire someone to do the drudge work. I think that's the key to his argument.

I suspect there's truth to both sides of this argument, and you can find a personal anecdote to believe either one. But unless you've actually hit success and walked away, I don't think you can wholly discount the Adams/banker approach.

Reminds me of the Tiger Mom's philosophy of parenting in which their children won't enjoy any of their activities (and usually they don't), that is, until they get good at them.

Conversely, I enjoy learning to do things, and after that magic has worn off I get bored.

Written enough code to put a 3D texture mapped model on the screen? That's enough for me.

Finally made a perfect batch of eclairs? I won't make any more.

I had somewhat of a Tiger Mom. She forced me to do multiplication tables while my friends were still onaddition, learn guitar while my peers were learning basketball, play chess while the other kids were playing video games, watch Bill Nye while everyone else was watching Nickelodeon. And I hated it, to some degree I hated my parents for it.

Until I realized all these SKILLS made me really fucking successful compared to everybody else my age. And all of a sudden I had passion. Passion for math, passion for learning, passion for science and technology and programming and computers. Ultimately, those skills instilled within me the passion that leads to me writing this post on Hacker News today.

And I thank my Tiger Mom for that every chance I get.

My parents pretty much left me to my own devices, and I'm still posting on hacker news. Also, i know people who were forced to learn piano as kids etc. and they are pretty much nowhere as adults. I'd say it's more genetics than anything.

I'm just confused as to why we're using posting on HN as a measure of success.

Yeah me too :) I merely applied the measure used by OP to illustrate my point. Agree that there are better metrics for success; as for the measure for procrastination, it's probably spot on ;)

It's genetics, in that genetically you have a probability of being inclined towards whatever subject your Tiger parent is subjecting you to. If that isn't the case, you have a massive misallocation of energy.

I'm against Tiger parenting as a blanket strategy prescribed for all. The fact is that not all parents are equipped to micromanage their children's careers, nor does the physical and emotional abuse involved necessarily lead to best results. The latter is like a shot of steroids - get short term results but lasting damage in all but the hands of experts.

That depends entirely on the child - my eldest is a perfectionist and hates being bad at something, the youngest is quite happy doing the activity, even if she isn't very good at it.

Tiger Mom doesn't follow the path of least resistance, and uses emotional and physical abuse to enforce compliance. That the child might achieve enjoyment at the endpoint is only one of many possible outcomes.

I disagree. I think that you have to take ownership of your own career and advancement. Until you reach a level, where you can really take ownership within a company.

Employers these days will not raise your salary at market rate without you jumping from company to company.

For example, person A stays at one company for 5 years and person B jumps from company to company every 1 to 2 years. At the end of the 5 years, person B will be making a lot more than person A.

What are you disagreeing with? The article explicitly makes the same point: "your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job".

// Edit: I'm assuming you were attempting to reply to a sibling comment but posted a comment on the article instead of a reply.

Whoops, yes. I was replying to someone off of my phone.

Depends on the employers. It would be really stupid not to keep the salaries up to date. It's been said over and over again, it's taught in business schools, hell you can even google a lucky "management tutorial" right now and it's written there. Management should know this, this is their job. If the employers are incompetent then, yes you should leave.

Having gone to business school, and having worked for well-known tech companies, I can assure you that there is approximately zero overlap between what you learn in Organizational Behavior class and what is practiced in real companies by imperfectly human managers.

It's not really productive to say "everyone is incompetent." It's more productive to figure out how to manage your own career in an imperfect world.

reminds me of a person I know. She will cross the street and never look. She almost got hit by a car one day. I stop her and tell her she needs to look before crossing. She says "I have the right-of-way, if they hit me it's their fault."

Yeah. I couldn't disagree. But I had to remind her that physics is the real law of the land. Doesn't matter much who is at fault, if you're dead.

Point being, academic theory never matches reality.

We don't disagree. My point is there are plenty of employers who will keep your salary up to date. Of course if they fail to do so, you should leave and move on to a higher salary. They are at fault, so they should take the loss and redo their hiring experiments all over again. Simple as that.

Previous submission (no comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6537381

I wish that comments about previous submissions of the same article could be added to the HN commenting guidelines as "noise", and to be avoided, unless they were very far back, and actually contain useful comments.

Telling us it's been submitted previously, and with no comments (!), seems like a particularly useless bit of information. Am I supposed to care? Click over to it? Up vote it? Comment over there? Exactly how did you hope to enrich the comment feed here by posting that?

Your question is fair. Here, noting that the article has been submitted before is perhaps an illustration of the role of luck ("survivorship bias") in attaining success. I appreciate such notices (and regularly upvote them, from anybody) because I like a reality check on the feeling "Haven't I seen this article before?"

Alright. If people are getting value out of these public notices, keep 'em coming. :)

What I learned from that experience is that there is no such thing as useful information that comes from a company's management. Now I diversify and let the lying get smoothed out by all the other variables in my investments.

I've found that this can be as true for internal communication as external, at least once it goes beyond the communication of immediate assignments and expectations.

You know those "business unit", "segment", "all hands" and the like "state of the business" meetings? Yeah, those.

Actually, sometimes those are not exactly zero content. The more they try to convince you that something isn't, the more you may be inclined to assume that it actually is.

This is great. I just wish he hadn't stopped listing failures.

Agreed. This is a teaser for his upcoming book, I'm sure there are more failures listed there. Here's another similarly-themed article[1] he wrote in 2011

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870410160457624...

Thanks for the share, great read; this alone deserves it's own HN submission.

If you drill down on any success story, you always discover that luck was a huge part of it. You can't control luck, but you can move from a game with bad odds to one with better odds. You can make it easier for luck to find you. The most useful thing you can do is stay in the game. If your current get-rich project fails, take what you learned and try something else. Keep repeating until something lucky happens. The universe has plenty of luck to go around; you just need to keep your hand raised until it's your turn. It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.

I think that says it all, vis-a-vis the "luck" thing. Well said, Mr. Adams.

This is good advice... for _some_ people.For those who might make the mistakes he's alluding to. Other people will have a different character where passion is indeed what makes them make good decisions and succeed.

So, like all advice, this works for some of the people, some of the time. As he said himself in the text: "Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. "

I liked the article.

But the irony is that if he had written the exact same thing prior to achieving success with Dilbert it would mean absolutely nothing to the masses and hardly be taken seriously at all. But yet I'm sure he would admit that Dilbert succeeding was total luck after so many "failures".

There are many people who are successful with many good things to say but nobody would ever take anything they say seriously before that lucky event (by that I mean on a wide scale basis I'm not saying that an individual might not listen to another offering some good advice.)

I think that's fair, though. There are enough people who are old enough alive at any given time to have seen their system through to success or failure that it makes reasonable sense to prefer their experience over people just starting out.

As a basic filter, you could do worse.

Love reading stories about how people failed, it helps to know that everyone has ups and downs. FailCon - a conference just focused on hearing failures stories from successful startup founders is Oct 21st in SF and there are still a few tickets: www.thefailcon.com - me and my co-producer, Cassie, started it because we wanted to make talking about failure less taboo. I think it's working. :)

> Dilbert started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased because I realized it could be my golden ticket. In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

I'd argue that Scott Adams' argument about passion isn't telling the whole story. I think Tom Kelley of IDEO said it best - He said to imagine a Venn diagram with three circles (1) What you love, (2) What you're great at, and (3) What makes money. Finding something that satisfies all three is ideal (but probably unattainable for most), while Scott Adams seems to be arguing that having (2) and (3) without (1) is the "best bet". Both are fair points, I think.

> On the other hand, Dilbert started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased because I realized it could be my golden ticket. In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success. > > So forget about passion. And while you're at it, forget about goals, too.

This is the generalized version of: "It's not the ideas, it's the execution". And I have to say, I agree. It's not that ideas don't matter...but unless you already have some amazing foundation of wealth or opportunity, you need a good process to get to the point where reaching your idea is feasible.

This was a really good read.

I think his "have a system" is really better explained as keeping your goals dynamic, like "make my repeating income grow" or "always look for a better job." . I loved the piece, but was confused by the choice of "have a system" like some other comments have pointed out.

I think this mindset is akin to Taleb's antifragile concept. If your goals are always trying to better yourself in some way or another, than any random events that cause your situation to get worse will increase your motivation to succeed. benefit from randomness, good or bad.

What exactly does "system-oriented" mean? The article seems sort of contradictory to me. On one hand he is saying having goals is for losers and you need to be system-oriented instead, but on the other he is saying that his goal was to make it rich and he just tried a bunch of stuff until he reached that goal.

The example of the person constantly looking for a better job is also confusing. Isn't the goal of that person to have a better job and he is just repeating the same goal over and over?

I don't see any contradiction.

Goal : Lose 10 pounds. System: Eat healthily and exercise every day, without looking at the scale.

Goal : Find a better job (when you think you need it) System : Be always on the lookout for a better job (even you are content with you current one)

Get fan of you but still i will walk on my success path. i thing it is not necessary to read article from other to become successful. yes we can take a idea but every man have own dream ,own ideas and own work power. Steve not read others idea,Same Gandhi didn't read other to be successful. They work own their dreams with their idea and knowledge.So i want to sat stick with dreams and take idea from that type articles but not implement all they say.

This sounds like great advice, but seems to contradict his (past?) use of, to quote him, "...something called affirmations, where you write your goals daily." (see http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/dilbert_20/)

Obviously his system oriented approach has room for overall goals, but the WSJ article comes across as totally anti-goal.

"Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal." - Earl Nightingale

That's the definition I have adopted. Have a worthy ideal? Yes. Making progress, even through setbacks? Yes. Therefore, I feel successful due to my belief. The feeling of success attracts more of it. Win.

Man, I could use some actionable advice about how to improve my lot right now, but I can never seem to find it in such articles!

Scott Adams is also an edge case, in that he is a world class cartoonist. Without that level of talent, I don't think his "systems" would work.

"Let me start with some tips on what not to do. Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike."

Is there a potential "mise en abyme" here? :-)

great article, best I've read is while though, cheers. F

While reading the part where he gets into details about passion, I felt like the author uses "passion" as a substitute for "excitement".

For instance:

"I've been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion.

The ones that didn't work out—and that would be most of them—slowly drained my passion as they failed."

I believe passion just exists. It cannot be drained. You either have or you don't. Now of course, you can discover it, after all you cannot be passionate about things you haven't experienced, but once discovered I don't believe passion can be lost. Granted though, "passion" and "enthusiasm" are synonyms, so the distinction is slightly tricky.

on passion vs grinding: don't you think that this guy is presenting a false dichotomy here? Couldn't I (and I would!) lend to the guy who loves his job... AND is prepared to work hard at it?

    If you're already as successful as you want to be, both personally and professionally, congratulations!

The secret to being that successful is to be happy with whatever you have.

You might want to check out this talk by Bret Victor, "Inventing on Principle": http://vimeo.com/36579366

Tell me again how this is different than Malcolm Gladwell? Same format, same insight-porn result, yet this guy is heralded by you all and Gladwell is eviscerated. Confusing, really.

As we think about success as habits vs. goals, a good app to consider in practice is Lift [1], available for the web and iOS.

1: http://lift.do

A hundred years earlier: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."

I was waiting for this to hit HN, it was basically written for this community.

(It was first published in the friday WSJ)

he told me he was the CEO of a company that made screws. He offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was a continuing process.

I can't even read another one of these. I've noticed one thing about these success stories; they always leave out the people, connections, and family money that made them successful. I've met very few Horatio Alger's. Old reference. 99% of the "Successful" kids I went to school with had rich parents. Gavin Newsom comes to mind. He was voted most fashionable at Redwood. He was an idiot. His parents paid for every business until one stuck. I know the current Gold Rush is different, but beware of the rich telling the poor how to succeed. Oh, and the books-- they never end. I guess the truth is hard to stomach for most successful people? I've always questioned what real success is anyways. Does it really matter if you have a billion dollars if you have a tumor in your pancreas? I certain parts of the world I hear integrity, honesty, and true altruism are what people call Successful--not here though. are

I'm curious how you think this worked in the specific case here of Scott Adams. His Dilbert has been on a decline for ages, and it still manages to be one of the most consistently funny comic strips out there. In his heyday probably half of the tech guys in the US had one of his comics posted on the wall of their cubical.

How did his (alleged) people, connections, and family money make that happen? Have they been hiring funny people to ghostwrite the strip? Did they make sure funnier writers were blacklisted? Did they somehow send him to a mystical funny school? If people were being paid to hang up his strips on their wall, I never got my check...

> How did his (alleged) people, connections, and family money make that happen?

Did Scott Adams grow up in a slum and receive a US "inner city" education?

Alternatively, did he grow up on a farm with a family that expected him to work to help support it once he could drop-out of school without repercussion?

Are you starting to see where this is going?

You seem to be conflating "rich" with "not poor".

Who said anything about `rich'? Neither I nor the parent ever used the word.

The great grandparent who started off the line of reasoning was pretty explicit about it, saying things like the following:

> 99% of the "Successful" kids I went to school with had rich parents

In either case, you're referring to a poor minority of Americans. I don't think anyone else was arguing that average Americans are overprivileged compared to ... other average Americans.

(If I misinterpreted, please let me know: I've been on a roll today.)

It's all who you know? http://sivers.org/xn

"Luckily, who you know is up to you, not luck."

At least Gavin Newsom doesn't blame the poor. I'm fairly certain (or at least hopeful) that he's aware of his own privileges in life.

>>Does it really matter if you have a billion dollars if you have a tumor in your pancreas?

It does matters a lot if you don't have a billion dollars while you have a tumor in your pancreas.

YC, Hacker News, Arc, and PG's essays are all counterexamples to "success causes passion." The passion came first.

Counterexamples or examples that don't fit this one pattern? Do you think the passion _caused_ the success just because it came first?

Do you think the passion _caused_ the success?

I think his success was equal parts intelligence and determination ("passion"). It seems true to say that those two ingredients alone were necessary and sufficient.

He could still fail due to a run of bad luck. But it's a pretty safe bet that if things start to slip downhill, those setbacks won't make him any less determined.

If a person's passion springs from their success, then they'll be discouraged when setbacks inevitably happen. Paul's model seems better: (a) doggedly pursue (b) something you're pretty sure will succeed. It'd be hard to doggedly pursue something that you're not already passionate about.

In fact, that pattern seems common. Drew had decided to commit himself exclusively to Dropbox before even applying to YC; Airbnb's founders flew to NYC every week during YC to talk to users; Watsi's founders would probably do Watsi whether or not it was a huge success; etc. In every case it seems like their passion was independent of their success, because none of them were willing to give up under any circumstances. That's quite a different situation than someone whose determination depends on a positive feedback loop of success.

YC not necessarily, PG pre-selects already highly successful people. They're just not startup millionaires yet.

Hghly successful people? Isn't he mostly targeting graduates?

Of top tier schools, or who have worked for top tier companies. Remember his goal shifted recently from funding the best ideas to funding the best people and then finding them a good idea.

What I meant, I don't consider someone who just graduated from Standford and/or worked for a few years at Google "highly successful". It means they're capable and motivated, and that's probably what PG's selecting for.

We're using two different definitions of "highly successful". I'm comparing to the populace at large, where getting into Harvard/Stanford/MIT or worked at Google very much = highly successful.

I think you're probably using the metric, did they found a startup that hit a billion dollar valuation, or something along those lines.

Given that PG was already successful before YC and HN, what makes you assert that the passion came first?

Adams doesn't disagree:

"I've been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion.

The ones that didn't work out—and that would be most of them—slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded."

Mostly wrong.

Arc is a success by what measure? Sure, it's passion, but timecube is also passion.

pg's first startup was an online art gallery. He was passionate about art. Nobody wanted it. They switched to a built-to-flip online store with no passion besides getting rich off 90s computer madness. That part worked.

Perhaps you need a small amount of passion to get started. But passion and success are not independent, they form a very strong feedback loop.

It is much easier to be passionate about a project that other people love (measured in downloads, users, revenue, media response or just feedback emails), than working on something that nobody else cares about for years.

I think his point was that success and passion aren't necessarily correlated, so while passion might be a prerequisite for success (but maybe not), having passion isn't a very good indicator that any one person will be successful. It's much more likely that a tried-and-true idea executed well will make money.

That point is emphasized by the fact that his bank wouldn't loan money to passionate people, so I'd say if you want advice you can "take to the bank," this is a good example of that. Of course, if you define success as something other than "make a lot of money," then this is probably the wrong article to be reading.

I think the difference here is that YC invests in new kinds of products or services, whereas Adams' bank loans fund existing business models. PG states that passion is a pretty good indicator whether someone else would be interested in your new product, because you yourself want one. On the other hand, passion wouldn't help you make unbiased and calculated business decisions.

Forget passion. Goals are for losers.

Imagine if Steve Jobs followed this path. Imaging if everyone did. Does financial success while doing something arduous for 40 years make for happiness? This seems counter intuitive.

We would have no innovation if there was no passion. We wouldn't even have electricity...

I hate to be nitpicky, but the part about always looking for a better job is horrible advice in terms of marketing yourself. It's pretty well-known that bouncing around from job to job turns pretty much every employer off.

But then again, the type of person Adams is describing is more of an entrepreneur type and not the typical desk jockey.

He didn't say to always be 'taking' new jobs, he said to always be 'looking'. And I'm guessing he's not exactly referring to "sending out resumes" or "going to every interview you possibly can."

Exactly. Always be looking around, networking, keeping up with trends in local companies and salaries. Be proactive and don't assume your current job will be there tomorrow.

I would have to disagree. I think for personal finances and experience you will always get a better deal by moving to another job every 1-3 years. 3 years might be the maximum if you're just doing the regular salary type of job. I have no experience with the start-up scene and I'm talking just about regular corporate jobs that offer no equity or valuable stock options.

I think that probably depends a lot on where you work, and your seniority - in Spain a senior developer or project manager that changed jobs yearly would have a harder time finding work than one who showed more loyalty to his/her company.

I'm speaking from a perspective of working in the US which I should have clarified. Over here loyalty doesn't seem to matter much anymore. It's all about making money.

It's pretty well-known that bouncing around from job to job turns pretty much every employer off.

I beg to differ. That might have been the case before, but nowadays this kind of "mobility" is almost expected.

As someone that subscribes to this view, I don't think he's advising bouncing from job to job. Often, I think this mentality is more a matter of being mindful about how the work you're doing is impacting your marketability and future prospects. Also, I find this mentality to be a good way of motivating myself when I'm getting organized and grinding through projects - I take note of anything new I'm doing that might be relevant to other employers and note the value of being the kind of employee that can run through these things quickly.

Admittedly, it would be harder to have this mentality if you're set on staying with a company for 5+ years, but even then, shouldn't you be looking at other employers for salary negotiations? Shouldn't you be looking at potential advancement opportunities within your department/company?

It doesn't if the experience gained makes you worth it, despite the implied risk of flight. If anything, it makes you unhirable for positions where employer values above all predictable mediocrity (ie. most corporate grind jobs), which is not a bad thing.

I don't understand how people would stay at a low-paying or (what I see as) non-fulfulling job for very long. Don't these people want to grow? Aren't the curious as to what else is out there? Forget the chances for more pay, benefits, etc.

> I don't understand how people would stay at a low-paying or (what I see as) non-fulfulling job for very long. Don't these people want to grow?

A lot of people see work as a necessary evil to support their real life, away from work. They want to grow, too, but perhaps they prefer a mountain hike or going to soccer training with their daughter instead of reading the release notes for the next OS X.

You should try it.

I don't know where you're coming from but you're missing the point.

Why stay at SuperBurger forever when MegaBurger opens up or you could even move up to making burgers at the fancy sit-down place down the road? You're not affecting father-daughter time since you're not at home working on burgers with all your free time or going to burger conferences instead of having daddy-daughter time.

Point is, the more fulfilling job often requires much longer hours which certainly do cut into parent-child time. Remember, when highly successful people are asked "if you had it to do over, what would you do differently?" one of the most frequent answers is "spend more time with my children."

And then there's the reverse: unsuccessful people, who spent mountains of time with their children, friends, and family, say "I wish I'd taken more risks."

Statistically-speaking, that is by far the most common response, because most people are not "highly successful people".

> Don't these people want to grow? Aren't the curious as to what else is out there?

In the world of work? Not in the slightest.

I'd love to be a mathematician, or cryptographer, or pilot. But I don't have the mindset or qualifications and never will have. In that case, best to just slog away during the day and 'grow' outside work.

Everything in moderation. This has been my modus operandi for nearly a decade now. Looking does not mean taking. Once I take a new job, after the first 30 days, I know I've got a window of about 12 months that I should stick around or it's going to look like I'm flakey/don't play well with others, etc... But I'm always looking.

I hate to even interview people that stayed in one job too long. They tend to be weak candidates.

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