Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)
en.wikisource.org
en.wikisource.org
Society places too much importance on the buds of ideas. True, an idea can change the world. But what gets lost in the shuffle is the fact that what truly matters is in those ideas being executed and turned into something tangible.
The charismatic idea men are a dime a dozen. I'm sure everyone here has worked with some hand-waving, smooth talking salesman who wows investors, then fail hard at meeting promises. It's those who can execute that are truly transformative.
Execution matters.
It's almost like they both have to be in tandem or something.
If both people have respect and trust for each other I think it's one of the strongest partnerships you can have. If one bullies the other around though, then that's when it usually breaks down.
Incidentally (And I welcome negative points here) a great indicator of the capacity to focus for a long time on boring things and finish, should be college. It's no wonder many hacker geniuses can't finish it.
We should instead learn to recognize human diversity and accept that besides the "well rounded hard worker" that needs to make up at least 50% of any team, we also need to find ways of making use and helping thrive:
- the always starters: the guys that always start new things and have new ideas (that actually work!) but maybe never finish anything -- maybe we should stop pressing them to finish, just rotate them from one department to another and then let the rest work to bring his works to completion
- the motivation dynamites: the people whose minds go up in fire and also set fire to the minds of people around them -- maybe we should use them by rotating them to projects that lack motivation, or use them to launch viral social media campaigns or something
- the distracted geniuses: the thing with the "distracted genius" is that if you teach him how to "focus", he become way more productive but stops being a genius, and you then have another a-little-above-average-chap -- maybe we should use the "ideas volcanos" as a competitive advantage and stop telling them to focus, like encourage them to publish their ideas that cannot be implemented online on a company blog - yeah, the competition will steal some of them, but your company will become uber-attractive and everyone will want to work for "a company from which so many uber-cool ideas come from"
...and then there's the generalization that most of these types of brilliant people are essentially not team players -- they shouldn't be forced to work as part of one team or stick to a team: maybe a corporate environment may just perpetually rotate them from one team/project to another, not even bothering to let them finish what they are doing; maybe a startup should stop trying to get them on-board and just keep them as well paid consultants (and allow them to consult for even a dozen other companies at the same time to keep their minds busy).
...and maybe all the ideas above are wrong, but the point is that we are incredibly bad at making use of brilliant people in business context and focusing on "just use hard working average joes" instead is an avoidance of the problem, not a solution!
The world only remembers the one who finishes, rather than the one who throws out an idea and then walks off. It may be easy for the brilliant guy to find excuses to not make more commitment and finish, he's just being either lazy or inconfident to implement his own idea. If he never finishes a thing, how can he know if it is good or not? how can he gather more practical experience?
It may or may not be good for the employer, it is definitely bad for the employeed to indulge in not having to finish.
A "brilliant never-finisher" is great for the idea->'kind-of-working prototype'/PoC, and yes, I think they should struggle to at least get to this, not just throw an idea. But the thing is that this is usually just 20% of the road, and they'd bee useless or even damaging for the rest of the 80%, so it's better to let them move on. And the 'damaging' part is very real (!!): someone who keeps pouring new and better ideas into a project that already has the ideas it needs to be a product is actually bringing negative value by increasing time-to-market, even if everyone only perceives the fact that the product would not even exist without him and that all his ideas are great.
By letting the 'brilliant non finisher' start a new project (just give him something challenging and an almost-zero budget until he's really needed again if the company doesn't have the resources for something else), you're avoiding a potential big loss or even a catastrophic failure (imagine the competition brings something inferior to market, grabs to whole market share, and then even poaches the brilliant guys from you afterwards). The only cost to pay would be that you need to keep paying the brilliants for the rest 80% of project duration to keep them for feedback and new projects, while they climb rocks or sip cocktails and you and the rest of the team sweat your guts out (hard to swallow) OR finance some micro-pet-projects to keep their minds working (hard to support).
I have the feeling, that everyone who don't want to do real work, is this kind of person...
There are a big bunch of people out there with ideas, but only a fraction of them will realize their ideas.
This is why there are "non-technical-founders" (I have this idea, I just need someone _helping_ me to implement it) and why developers are paid so much money.
Because everyone can have ideas, but not everyone can make them work.
When people say "ideas guy", at least in my local techno-sphere, it means the person that has "some great idea", but no skills to implement, no skills to sell it, and no money to back it.
We get "idea guys" at our tech meetups on a somewhat regular basis. They just show up one day, and it's always the same thing, "So I have this great idea to do X, but I don't know how to program. I don't have any money to pay anyone, but I'll give you a 10% equity to build my idea. Huh?, no no I don't have any existing customer relationships either. Now which one of you can get this done the fastest?"
On the other hand we have people that fit into one of the 3 necessary/valuable categories (Implementers/Sellers/Financial Backers). People in all 3 of these categories have ideas and add real value.
The value of any given idea is really low - I would argue that for many organisations ideas even have a negative value on average, because you are going to spend a lot of time dealing with the idea without it actually becoming something that generate value in the end.
Even if you have an idea, that works, and that will generate significant value if realised, until that idea IS realised, it is a negative cost.
People who can generate a large amount of those ideas are a commodity.
People who can cheaply identify an idea that can be realised and that have access to resources to realise it, and that can go through the process of actually realising the idea are not a commodity.
The bottle neck for putting new ideas to market is not the idea generation, and so the people who consider themselves "always starters" is not a scarce resource, hence I dont need to rotate them from department to department - every department I have already have access to more than enough good ideas, so adding the "always starter" to that department would be a negative cost.
I would agree if you mean average idea. Really great ideas are rare, difficult, and can change the world. The people who come up with those are rather special.
And, unfortunately, rare, and almost never (in my somewhat limited experience) think of themselves as 'idea guys.'
But this hivemind (nicely crurated by VCs- think that through) that ideas are worthless is very wrong. Unfortunately, discussions about it tend to start conflating ideas and execution- as, indeed, it is hard to separate them when you get down to it.
The truly rare, difficult and world-changing is the realization (production, enactment, what have you) of a really great idea, and the luck of that realization occurring in the right context.
Nonetheless that doesn't make the idea itself worth little (let alone nothing). By analogy, land is normally little use unless you put a building or infrastructure on it or start farming or mining it. And it's seriously expensive and difficult to do those things. But that doesn't make the value of land low. Land isn't just valuable, it's expensive in the most literal and straightforward you-pay-money-for-it sense, sometimes staggeringly so.
Land doesn't have any intrinsic value. There are two reasons (unused) land has value:
1) Someone expects to be able to use it to create value 2) Someone expects that someone else will want to use it to create value in the future and they expect that scarcity will come into play allowing them to charge more for it in the future than it currently costs to buy.
Land is only staggeringly expensive if either the value expected to be generated from 1) is exceptionally high or the expected value someone else will generate from it in 2) is exceptionally high.
If those aren't in play, you can get land very cheaply, or even for free, or in extreme cases be paid to take over land (that usually only applies for contaminated land etc).
Obviously ideas are less reliably scarce than land, because a number of people can have the same idea independently, and also because once another person hears your idea they can steal your fire without paying you, so it's difficult to trade an idea in a way that doesn't remove your ability to capture the value from it. But a high-quality and unobvious idea tends to occur to only a few people at any time, and the awkwardness of trying to do deals with them is far from rendering them valueless either. It's certainly not the case that good ideas are plentiful in the sense that if there one specific good idea to solve your problem but you don't think of or hear of it, then don't worry, there are lots of similarly good and suitable ideas lying around and one is almost certain to come to your attention soon.
A different, and notable distinction between land and ideas is that people are usually better at recognising valuable land than good ideas, as Frank Aiken observed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken . This is one reason why some ability to "finish" (in terms of external circumstances as well as internal factors like temperament and character) is such a valuable accompaniment to having a good idea: it helps to have something relatively tangible (be it only a prototype) to force down others' throats.
It wasn't very brilliant then, was it?
Even ideas as earth shaking and complex as Infinitesimal Calculus and Quantum Mechanics were developed in parallel initial by people with little to no communication between each other.
It's not quite a "no true Scotsman" since great ideas do happen and happen fairly often, in the grand scheme of things (there are over 100 Nobel prize nominees every year). The oft-repeated argument about ideas versus execution is that ideas are a dime a dozen, which is true, but most of them are not really all that great or original. The same can be said for any resource.
That doesnt say that all ideas are useless. Huge businesses are built off of ideas all the time. Whether it be by accidental timing, cutting edge research, new synergy opportunities or actively spotting a hole that can be filled, the businesses start with an idea and they are not useless for sure.
Once you are up and operating a business however, if an idea is not about something you can trivially do as part of daily operations (continuous improvement has amazing value) but rather is something you need to divert significant resources or attention to in order to potentially realize some other values, then the value of the idea itself, on average, is low, because you will have a lot of these ideas, and you will not be able to dedicate your resources and attention to more than a few of them at a time.
It is far more valuable (on average) to be able to effectively choose WHICH of the already existing ideas have the best return than being able to add another idea to the pile.
Indeed. For one thing, probably nearly anyone who has successfully had good ideas is a "finisher" to some extent (though to very varying extents). Isaac Newton certainly thought hard and persevered in his researches, but as soon as you're bringing him in as an example of a "finisher" as opposed to an "ideas man" you've pretty badly undermined any distinction you were building between the two.
You definitely need both.
What looks like great clever idea in the beginning sometimes turns out to be too difficult to maintain down the road. The new technology or approach that speeds you up so incredibly during first weeks can became huge drag withing few months. Smart clever hacks so cool first six weeks can make the system extremely fragile twelve months later.
Your projects rotating starter never involved in later phases of the projects may become problem on himself.
Second argument is about fairness. Finishers are not people who love to do all that less exciting work needed to actually finish the thing. Neither are they too stupid to work on design phase.
Most often, they are people who feel responsibility towards project completion. If you do not allow them to work on those interesting parts too and force them to fix other peoples bugs all the time, they are likely to leave for another company.
Maybe these "always starters" and "distracted geniuses" are in search for truth and purity -- for meaning -- and are continuously iterating on and refining their value system in such a way that their values change between the time they start exploring an idea until the time they understand the idea. Or maybe their values don't change during the process, but once they fully understand the idea they were exploring, they find it's not valuable enough for them to commit more time to, even though others might find it valuable.
Jim's research reveals that the big things happen at the rare cross between creativity and discipline. It's the genius/artist who when they see and set their hands on the big thing, they grab it by the throat and don't let go.
Maybe the path to this intersection of creativity and discipline is for the genius/artist to first focus on peeling back the layers within themselves -- to spend time contemplating until they find their core values -- to "know thyself" -- and then once they have gotten to the root, they'll have the clarity of purpose needed to align their core values with their work and will be able to pursue their life's purpose without being distracted by frivolous matters.
Alternatively, working on tooling, libraries, tricky bug fixes and other odds and ends may be good projects for the inattentive.
That is an important question, and unfortunately, I haven't seen lots of books on that topic.
Except maybe "Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers" by J. Hank Rainwater: http://books.google.de/books/about/Herding_Cats.html?id=9xFP...
(This is not so much about "brilliant" people, but about creative people - especially good programmers - in general.)
It's been written on HN many times that work sample tests are very important in hiring decisions. Perhaps this is just more evidence of that. The good news is that it's much more practical to give such tests in software development than in sales (to my knowledge).
But let's not forget that he lived in different circumstances than today.
That said, there's a good lesson - if you hire sales people, their most attractive target will always be selling themselves to the guy who's writing their paycheck. It will not automatically be the actual customers or whatever you think their incentives are "supposed" to be.
You can't really be suggesting that commissions are the silver bullet for aligning incentives, as if that hasn't been tried for thousands of years already, with very mixed success :)
Additionally, employees optimizing for pay/effort instead of max pay is still a win for the company so long as the employee brings in marginally more than they cost.
This is "I got fucked up and crashed my Ford into a tree, so I'm never buying a Ford again."
If I repeatedly get fucked up and crash Fords over the course of my life while having much better luck with other cars, I might start looking for a causal relationship.
An insightful business owner will review their own psychology first and ask others for their impression in a way that doesn't reveal their bias.
And it's a parable, not a true story. The timing was 1924 - the roaring 20s. It's a commentary against the flashy types, in defense of the folks who put their heads down and work.
Risk reductions can be:
- invite people over to hang out, hack on something, or work on whatever they're working on
- start people on a contract gig
- maybe another contract or what works for them
- have an extremely informal non-interview, interview process
- trial period
- eventually FTE status in a set time-frame if both sides want it"Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do."
"These are quite simple rules...No Edison could ever qualify."
He was good at sales and marketing, however.
What Edison did possess was a remarkable capacity for what he called "hard work". Making the light bulb practical was something anybody could have done, if they'd had the willingness to burn through months of time and money performing dull experiments over and over and over again.
There was still a lot of low-hanging technological fruit in Edison's day, but 'low-hanging' didn't mean 'easy'. He made a business out of working harder than anyone else did to make contraptions practical.
People pooh-pooh him as unoriginal, dull, but that's the sort of man his work needed. He was also smarter than people gave him credit for, though he didn't match the sheer brilliance of Tesla. His industrial research facility at Menlo Park was the first of its kind, he set a lot of standards in the field and had a lot of influence. It's considered by many to be his most important innovation.
One thing is a little misleading though: he established a laboratory, with a group of inventors. I believe this was the first industrial-scale research laboratory in the world - like PARC. So much of the "hard work" is the hard work of all these other men - and they happily welcomed his name on their invention, even in cases where he didn't do much, they wanted his name there.
So although he did invent a lot personally, perhaps his greatest achievement was being able to lead and inspire intelligent and hard-working men to do what he did (as you say). Jobs and Wozniak rolled into one.
[1] My FAQ on company hiring procedures as posted earlier on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923
I'm now doing research to update that FAQ for posting on my personal website, a suggestion other HN readers kindly gave me.
Serious Question.
It'd be pretty interesting to compile a list of stories which people generally believe are true, but are actually fiction.
How, exactly, do you do a work-sample test for a chief sales executive anyway? "Hey, can you run our global sales division for a couple of hours, then we can evaluate if your methods really bring in the sales"?
Edit: to clarify on the work-sample question, in the story, the employee has been expressly hired to teach the existing staff new methods, which they actively recognise that they don't understand. How do you make a meaningful work-sample test for a sales chief that can be interpreted by a naif?
Bragging aside, I would assume this is one of those cases where a huge portion of the job is differentiating likely and unlikely sales targets, and applying effort accordingly.
I read it as a parable about the eternal question value, that is to always ask "Is this valuable or is it expensive?"
I'd probably be more expecting a Belbin or Myers-Briggs questionnaire to be required, than a work-sample test, to have my suitability tested for certain roles, despite the established effectiveness of various methods.
Great post btw, in the link.
My visceral reaction was that it was a huge generalization, but when I think about it more, I do have a difficult time thinking of people that are both charismatic and tech-savvy. The obvious example is Jobs, but even he wasn't the "tech" guy in a sense, we always associate that with Woz or others.
I guess for a lot of people here Musk is maybe an example of it? Is there some left/right brain separation that keeps techies from being charistmatic, is it a historical, cultural thing?
Or is it just a stereotype after all? :) It seems like a fascinating topic, though.
Nah. It's just that most techies are too busy doing brain things to learn soft skills like how to interact with people.
— a guy who struggled with being pretty awkward in high school, worked hard at socializing for a few years, and now does very well with business meetings / networking / parties even though he'd prefer to be delivering code
P.S.: "So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular."
Mind elaborating on that?
Techies could easily game the system; but that's a boring game for boring people, and in the grand scheme of things does not matter. There are much more important things to spend time on.
Interesting how people think the OP story is real and many people mistakeningly think Steve Yegge quit Google (he just quit the project).
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/hacker-news-fires-st...
'sama ! :)
It must suck to be a techy and have social skills because you'll get pegged as a business gal/guy even if you can hack with the best of em. Most people can't seem to handle the doublethink of two seemingly contradictory capabilities in one person. They need to find a simple job to reduce you to.
"Cannot be ... I NEVER met someone before who was like that. Let's poke around a bit more, I'm sure I'll find the flaw."
Funnily enough, you don't need to be a brilliant person to manage a 1920s grocery store. You need someone who's reliable, honest, and good at keeping minimum wage workers reliable and honest.
some of the most brilliant hackers i know are rightfully afraid of going into business with the kind of "brilliant men" described in this article.
just as non-technical founders benefit from learning to code for a myriad of reasons, hackers should do careful due diligence on a potential business partner. ask questions. require them to invest in the relationship. blow away the smoke and mirrors if you see their evidence, until you see that person in a humble light.
most of the time, this kind of salesperson is masking deep personality flaws which you can actually live with in exchange for the benefits, on one condition: the existence of abiding integrity.
so many of these relationships are predatory but they don't have to be if you find ways to get them to show you their character. see how they treat their friends. travel with them. build something together.
something a friend taught me is "H.A.L.T." = hungry, angry, lonely, tired. 1) don't make decisions when you're in any of these states; 2) it applies to choosing a business partner but here, you WANT to see them this way. you can learn a lot about a person when their basic needs are momentarily threatened, including how they treat you and others. so don't be dazzled, find them in a humble light because that's where a person's character is revealed.
the ones you want are comfortable with their humility.
I think HALT is also useful for introspection. Sometimes you are forced to function and make decisions in this state and you can learn a lot about yourself when this happens.
You can do this through work but it is probably better outside of that, through some sort of pastime that you can make difficult. Mountains, climbing and cycling are what I think of but there are many ways to induce HALT.
Intentionally push yourself out of your comfort zone every now and then and you learn a lot about your personal limits and your character. If you can't get on with yourself in a HALT state then how is anyone else going to?
Stress the organism and it grows.
that's where a person's character resides. and people who manage to be honest, and generous and courageous in those moments, are the ones to surround yourself with. experience character-building through HALT, in spite of it, and you're on your way to being a better man or woman, i suspect.
I found this to be an unusual warning. Is "proper speech" really just a proxy for class in that time period? I'm now very curious about 1920s slang, especially its frequency of use in business settings.
Linguistics are an interesting thing, especially with geeks. Often, their analytical minds concoct elaborate sentences, which, like algorithms, are abstractions over many little things. I prefer the plain talker, the man who has seen the cathedral of long sentences and has realized only the priests understand him.
The point stands though. Slang is often used as an attention grabber or distractor. Like a comedian who curses a lot to shock you, which conceals that he doesn't really have anything to say.
>careful, detail-oriented and have good business sense and skills.
He was referring to the brilliant man who dress flashy, go to the hottest clubs, befriend people in higher stature, and dont really contribute to goals. They just have flashy ideas and move on to the next without realizing the goals of the first idea.
The author was not denigrating "brilliant" men; instead he was explaining a type of "brilliant" person that focuses their energy on coming up with brilliant ideas, but will not stay focused long enough to see it through to finish. Imagine if you are reliant on a co-founder who wants to be pivot every 6 months simply because all of the challenges of the first brilliant idea are solved, and all that remains is the hard work and execution?
The outcome of that scenario would likely be the outcome he experienced in his first business venture with his college friend, "[Carroll] is a bad employer for himself, but he could put a lot of ginger into somebody else's business. . ."
I'm category (a): creative, prone to mood swings, basically reliable but bad at the superficial reliability contests that determine advancement in most organizations. Yes, someone like me can be detail-oriented and show business acumen. We can be reliable. We're just not as competitive at being reliable (especially in the superficial ways, which are important in customer service) as others. If you need +3 sigma reliability-- someone who can work 100-hour weeks and not miss details or break rules or even become annoying-- you don't want +3 sigma creativity.
(I'm aware enough of the rough technical definition, I mean in the sense that if you think there are 500,000 super special people in the U.S. can you do anything useful to find them?)
My point is that there's a strong negative correlation, especially at the competitive upper reaches, between creativity and the sort os superficial reliability that (a) tends to determine a person's ability to advance in organizations, and (b) you'd probably want in someone you put in front of difficult clients on a regular basis.
I like the author's anecdotes and agree with some conclusions because I've run into people with the same personality traits. (We all probably have.) But Newton was both brilliant and stubborn as was Einstein. They didn't understand something in the physical world so they continued thinking about it until they were satisfied.
Human organizations need a balance of brilliance and plodders. I'd say they need many fewer brilliant people because it takes a large number of plodders to bring their ideas to fulfillment. But the brilliant people are looking to the future while the plodders are dealing with today.
It's hard.
Also, allow yourself some blow-out projects. You don't have to finish everything, but you want to become reliable. I.e. if you say you'll do something, then you'll do it.
Read "The Effective Executive" by Peter Drucker, which addresses this in greater detail.
I either have to settle with how things are now or change the work situation I think. I'll look into that book anyway.
"How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives."
I wish I were as good at taking this advice as at giving it.
1. Lose the fear. (This is the root cause of all the other stuff.) Or, more
accurately, experience it but don't give in to it.
2. Timebox the work (as reasonably as one can) or limit "one more feature".
3. Fail fast, gracefully, and quietly. Learn when to *not* finish.
(You shouldn't be finishing *everything* you start. The problem is if
you finish *nothing*.)
4. Succeed decisively but simply (not ornately; don't aim for perfection).0. Pick up your targets CAREFULLY.
Which means value your energy and time. Be afraid of starting something, stop doing or believing you can do many things at the same time while history clearly shows otherwise is a killer mistake.
Lower the bar, start achieving small things and then, just MAYBE, you should think of adding more.
I would say I am not a finisher, but what I am trying to do is reducing these reasons: trying to understand/plan better to the deepest level, sleeping/eating well, getting more satisfaction from finishing things than starting one, and doing smaller things, selectively.
It took me a while to understand that my going-off-on-tangents had nothing to do with impatience. It had more to do with me not realizing that the last mile is the hardest. I would start everything with gusto but as soon as I hit a road-block, I would dawdle and eventually lose interest as soon as something new came up.
I now decide a (feasible) finish line in my head before starting a new activity and consciously check myself whenever I feel like I'm about to give up on it. I force myself to look at the finish line until I re-convince myself that I need to cross it before I can even think of giving up.
I am not 'there' yet but I am beginning to see some results and that eggs me on further. :)
I've found that exercising that sort of honesty works very well for me. It's like, if you value your word, (which I do,) then you can leverage it back against yourself when you have to do something difficult.
Don't know if it works that way for everyone who values their word, but it might be worth a go. Might need some fine-running at the start, making tamer goals than you think you can achieve to prevent inadvertently breaking your word.
If you quit when things get hard, maybe you need to realize that hard things are hard. Anything worth finishing will require you to bleed.
If you quit because you have to "feel like it" to work, you should work even when you don't feel like it. Hard things are hard, and nothing would ever get done if people did it only when they felt like it.
There are many reasons why people aren't finishers. You need to find out why, and then figure out similar people that have overcome it and the specific tactics they used to overcome it.
Conversely, if you accept excessive volatility by taking big bets, you can end up broke even if your expected value was positive.
Rule #1 according to Buffett: Never lose money. Rule #2: Don't forget Rule #1.
I learned this the hard way. Maybe I was brilliant.
>Rule #1: O(1). Rule #2: You don't need anything else
Or maybe Buffet just meant don't misplace your money, as in losing a $20 out of your wallet and finding it in your dryer after the laundry.
You'll end up with Windows Mobile.
We suspect that they probably have restrictive workplace policies, helpdesk in India and office politics. Those things OP won't like.
[NB For a fictionalized, but hugely entertaining, account of the relevant time in history I can recommend Neal Stephenson's wonderful "Baroque Cycle" - Newton is a major character.]
My Conclusion: Perceived Intelligence is a curse. I try to hide my academic accomplishments and cringe when someone says I have some above average brain. Can't tell you how many times I hear, "The best _____ isn't necessarily the straight A student." "We don't higher straight A students."
People with a higher capacity intellectually can take in more information and see more moves ahead. That way there is a different perception on solution and it causes frustration for everyone.
I'm convinced that the real solution, to the extent it's possible, is for highly intelligent people to find their way into positions that don't require social acceptance. Academics is obviously one destination (one log-jam, rather) for these types. But by all means avoid management, because that's where the attractiveness of your brilliance to employers and the unacceptability of your brilliance to your reports become a trap.
Well I went from working IT at Age 13 - 17 (Sales and programing) Artist and Art Restoration 17 - 20 Child Minister and Christian Camp Director 20 - 32 (LEAST FAVORITE JOB) RD and Systems Librarian at a College 32 - 37 (College as faculty is a very high drama environment) (FAVORITE JOB) - Head Start Literacy Coach for 250 3-5 year olds.
All the places it was bad to be thought of as intelligent though Pre-School had the fewest consequences.
I have a different theory. Assuming that:
- High IQ individuals tend to rely less on intuition and more on analytical thinking. <insert reference>
- IQ measures analytical thinking rather then intuition. <insert reference>
- Intuition often outperforms analytical thinking in many complex domains that require fast decision making (I believe the book "Thinking fast and slow" explores this theme). This could also be evidenced by the seeming lack of correlation between "success" and IQ, past a certain IQ level.
Then it could be possible that individuals who consistently outperform higher IQ individuals in a given domain find it frustrating working with them. The analytical person might point out flaws in their reasoning and the intuitive person might not be able to rationally defend their position although they are right.
Disclaimer: As someone who is (probably) high IQ and often victim of "over analysis"[0], I might just be projecting my own experience here. But intuitively, I'd say my theory makes sense ;)
Designing things to be "fun" is hard to do analytically. I'm a programmer, and I've observed programmers ruining game design by taking a designer's work and subjecting it to too much analysis. And the designers often can't defend their choices either.
Great comment!
In the case of the sales executive, it sounds like the author allowed his team to basically say "good luck doing this yourself, don't expect help from us." And he allowed the guy to move into an ivory tower far away from where things were happening.
If you decide you're moving in a certain direction, you need to make clear to the team, if necessary, that digging in their heels is not a response you're going to tolerate. Some people will probably have to move on.
I'm not surprised the article is anonymous. The owner sounds like a problem to me, as much as the "brilliant" sales executive. He's good at making a mediocre business, and his comfort zone is there. Trying to shake that up is a losing game for anyone, brilliant or otherwise.
In a knowledge economy built on creativity, I'll take Different Thinkers over Cogs of Constancy any day.
My mind is cluttered and I rely on spelling correction. Hard to say if I would get the position.
If you think this way, it's worth going back and examining the writings of people you admired. You might be surprised! Or not.
Confidence, intelligence, credentials, and experience can be faked or lied about. Comparing someone's written words with their speech, in person or over the phone, will give you a more reliable picture of how they think and communicate than anything else.
Reading this article is almost in perfect timing with my situation. I am 24 year old with only 2 years of college. I was learning more outside of school than in. Even though I might not be the best developer or maybe not even average, I took the jump in trying to make it. So far so good. With learning that experience is everything and know how to get help will take you far. I feel like I know twice as much as I did last year. Is it possible that a lot of us are trying to reach that feeling of accomplishment?
I most certainly pass this article on to friends and peers.
Things have gotten speedier, and yet, much lazier now - so much that we have begun to rely a fair bit on technology and a common shared understanding of the concepts that unite us into the communities we partake in. Add to that, the exchange of cultures via this great, big melting pot called the internet, and you get a hodge-podge of words, symbols and grammar that we end up loosely calling a language. As with all melting pots, the contents of this one have melded into each other so much that these changes to the contents have (again, literally) stuck!
TL;DR - It was different back then & it certainly is much different now. It really doesn't matter what words (or spellings) you choose; what matters is the thoughts you are trying to convey through your words (and spellings).
People who are asleep. People who are not actually alive. People who are threatened by those who think.
These people hate the thinker, but their dreary little lives rest directly on the foundation that the thinkers provide. For example, the radical who first looked at fire and thought, "hey, maybe I could use that".... now THAT GUY was a visionary who puts Musk to shame.
Really this type of people are just machines. And they will be the ones machines are easily able to replace.
A predictable machine is more useful to you than an unpredictable human.
The business in question, in this story, is a grocery store. It's a business with lots of competition and little innovation, where you're selling exclusively to customers who live very close to you. Furthermore, the fictional business owner isn't interested in taking the risks needed to build a massive chain, he's looking to grow slowly and make small, steady profits. For this business, there's no need for brilliance or big risks, you just need hard workers who are going to execute decently day in, day out.
A tech startup (the interest of most people on HN) is pretty much the complete opposite situation. You need brilliant programmers to build an excellent product. If you're B2C, you need those excellent salespeople who are going to dream big and go after massive deals. If you're B2B, you need great growth hackers/biz dev/marketers who can creatively get your product in front of massive numbers of people for minimal cost. When you're trying to grow from nothing to ginormous in 3-5 years, you simply can't do it with the slow grinding approach, the only way is with risk and brilliance. That doesn't mean there won't be grinding, repetitive tasks along the way, there will be TONNES, and you need people who will execute on them (not the pure "idea guys" with zero ability to execute, who I agree are of little use), but you also need to be dreaming big and taking big risks. Always going after small wins just doesn't work for tech startups, you need to regularly go after the big wins.
At a high level, I believe that's the essence of the story (whether is real or made-up).
Today, in a globalized world economy with saturated markets, we are lured into thinking that "the great next thing" will be a product of "brilliance". I think this is a good reminder that it's not. That in fact, on average, sustainable success is a product of a life's work and dedication to a purpose. That in fact, the Jobs, the Zuckerbergs and the Gates of the world are merely outliers and that we should look beyond the expectation of immediate and flamboyant returns.
Well, imagine that I have all your noble qualities, but I just couldn't get the $20,000 that was paid out to you in your sophomore year.
I write and speak pretty well, but am still ill-disciplined as anything.
> You conceive a big idea, get the whole organization on tiptoes to carry it out, and then you lose interest and go off on a new tangent.
Now that's me.
> You are always living, in imagination, about six jumps ahead.
Now that's definitely me.
> Their active minds can always see two sides to every question; and they stand still while the debate goes on inside.
Now that's definitely me.
> Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do.
Good news, I am a genius.
Moral: In an ideal world I will never get hired or get success in business. Hell I am doomed for sure.
This is true, but price is a poor indicator of how good something is. You need to understand the product or man, before you can judge which is the best.
The point of the article. Is this still true? I imagine you do need exceptional people to be able to hit the high notes (10x programmers and all that jazz).
Or am I interpreting this wrong, since the way he's using the word "brilliant" is a bit sarcastic, or at least archaic?
First, the OP claimed
"Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do."
but gave no evidence.
Second, on finishing, we can consider I. Newton, W. Mozart, C. Darwin ('Origin of the Species'), R. Wagner (operas, especially 'The Ring'), J. Maxwell (E&M), A. Einstein (general relativity), J. Oppenheimer (A-bomb), S. Ulam (H-bomb), J. Salk (polio vaccine), D. Henderson (Smallpox eradication), J. Heifetz (violin), W. Gates (Microsoft), A. Wiles (Fermat's last theorem), J. Bezos (Amazon).
1. "There are just two grades of commodities in the world: the best -- and the others."
2. "...whether he can talk and write effectively... If you write and speak neatly and accurately, it is because your thinking is orderly; if your expression is forceful, the thought back of it must be forceful. But if you blunder for words, punctuate incorrectly, spell incorrectly, and express yourself clumsily, I'm sure to believe you mind is cluttered and ill-disciplined."
Something to remember, is you can never finish more things then you start by definition.
I would not like to hire someone who always finished everything regardless of how mistaken they were when they started.
We will we all finish fewer things then we start. By itself it't not that useful of a metric.
Definitely my favourite stance. Does that mean Go will succeed, while Rust want? In absolute terms of money, not outstanding iceberg projects??
"God Almighty, in fashioning his most useful men, often works slowly with quite common stuff. Now and then He turns out a quick job of superfine materials -- a genius who really delivers the goods. But most of His better grade line is ordinary in everything except the extra effort, and dogged determination, which have given it a finer texture and finish."
This tells me of a belief in the innate quality of man, of some who are simply born better than others. Surely only half the story. We know better today.
With a sound internal structure this risk can be controlled and isolated within organizations to get good results -- e.g. spawning research labs, creating "distributed labs" like Google, etc.
This is not some ancient belief. It's nature as opposed to nurture, and you see the same thing today when people talk about genetics.
The big thing there, the part that resonated in my mind, was finish. I need to finish more things...
The person that started less 'brilliant', through finishing, can usurp the brilliance of the one that started strong. Intelligence is a gift and should be nurtured, not presumed on.
Furthermore, he's found he prefers to select hard workers and promote them up than to pick smart, ambitious kids from good families or good credentials. Hard work is better than sheer brilliance.
Yeah yeah "that's the way it was back then"..
This is a truth that holds today (in the form of things like LinkedIn Recommendations): Outside of exceptional circumstances, people seldom talk up the people they need the most, but they will talk up the people they wouldn't mind losing.
The disorganization of his "brilliant men" (which is a conflation of two types of people already-- the charismatic and the creative) seems to be something the corporate world (at least in 2014 technology) creates.
The "brilliant" just fall hardest, I'd argue, because highly creative people (one subtype he describes) tend to be most sensitive to context, and highly charismatic people (the other subtype) can usually assume the failure patterns of the highly creative.
The not-finishing culture, I think, is a product of the incoherency of the corporate world. It's not uncommon to see people pass years in Corporate America without achieving anything for reasons not their fault: shifting priorities, projects cancelled for stupid political reasons, "re-orgs", unclear direction.
At some point, people learn that Corporate Life is survived not by finishing (in fact, that can be harmful, because now you have support responsibilities) but being able to come up with a story when things outside your control stop you from finishing. The muddling effects of subordination compound this decline of executive function. It's rather sad, to tell the truth. I wish it weren't that way.
I don't think it's just "brilliant men" who fail, in this way, amid the jarring incoherency of most business. I think they just crash first and hardest. The rest tend to drift downward over time and underperform silently.
But there is another way, and that is to work in secret, and fit this secret work into natural breaks in your normal work. For example, part of my job is running a suite of reports on a monthly basis. Every time I run these reports I do a little work to make them easier/quicker to run next time. Over the space of a year this kind of work can really pay off, and frees up more time to do more satisfying work, but the key is to improve in secret, it's rarely appreciated at the time.
It makes sense now, marketing, sales, good software practices, these all take discipline, endurance and the need to apply yourself every single day. It's definitely not a sprint and I've built myself to sprint long distances and burning out at the last remaining mile.
If the wisdom is a 100 years old and it still strikes a chord with our modern business environment, it must be important.
Great read, I read the whole thing.
It is much easier for me to do 80 hour workload in 40 hours than 20 hour workload in the same 40. Probably I am not the only one. If I have even ounce of non challenging time at work I am always searching for the next great feature/framework/whatever. And shipping slips. I finally managed to find my stride but a few projects ... lets say they were hard on everyone.