The Beginner's Guide to Believing in Yourself

ajjuliani.com

15 points·ajjuliani··5 comments

This is full of survivorship bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

There's not much indication that paying close attention to the outliers who "won" can really teach us much.

Focusing on the two characters may sound like survivor bias; both being the extreme outliers. Nevertheless it is the message I hear it often here and outside. Start doing something, be it an itch or anything, and then just start working on it. If it is what you'll love to do for the rest of your life you will keep going on it even if you fail. Paul Graham wrote an inspiring assay on this [1].

[1] http://paulgraham.com/love.html

> Most people I talk to seem to act like J.K. Rowling and Richard Branson are outliers. They made it big under circumstances that would crush most of us.

Perhaps there's lucky breaks and rare opportunities.

What was it Bruce Sterling said a while back? "You can be Microsoft but someone has to bend over and be IBM."

Sometimes I think like this. I'm working on some prototype for something I'm trying to make, now. still, scratching an itch might be good advice since I don't feel like a horrible bad engineer when I'm working on it.

I'm not a 'failure' at work yet but most of the team doesn't want me there and I sure feel like a loser when I walk in those doors.

also, survior bias, this article is.

I never heard of that term "Survivorship Bias" but I like it. My real point (that I make towards the end) is not that we can follow the path of people like JK and Branson, but that we continue to believe in ourselves.

I do believe writers can learn from her story, entrepreneurs can learn from Branson, just as investors can learn from Buffet...

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