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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

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raverbashing

"never has been on time once; it gave him an edge"

What edge?

If you are late to certain meetings people will turn you away. Yes, this happens.

Small delays are acceptable, but apparently he got lucky (or made his career in Spain)

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No in the Netherlands and then northern EU after that. The edge (which I notice too) is that you seem stronger if you have the balls to show up late, even if there are people 'higher up' in the room (or people you want something from). Anecdotal: in a meeting with an AXA director and his colleagues (a potential client) I was 45 minutes late (not on purpose, I don't do it on purpose) and he said; 'here is a guy who is more important than I am wink wink'. We got the project and we became friends.

Must say that in NL in the beginning of my career I always was punctual (getting up 1 hour early to make sure I was there ahead of time); when I stopped doing that, I got more successful. Not sure if that's related, but I also have no more stress, so I'm not changing that myself.

This makes sense, however I would make sure to not be late on certain meetings.

No to be fair, if it is a one on one meeting and I know the person is a stickler for being punctual I try harder. Like said; it's not something I do on purpose, but especially with MORNING (9 am) meetings, I just don't like getting woken by alarms so I don't set them.

In other words, you don't respect the other person enough to abide by the obligation that you created by agreeing to a 9 am meeting.

If you don't want 9 am meetings, don't accept them. If you do, you're obligated to show up on time, and you are being selfish and petulant by your willful refusal to set an alarm clock because you don't like it.

And I don't. The part with the alarm was not about meetings I set myself. That is about meetings I have to be present at planned by others. Anyway it all sounds worse now than it is and I guess it is culteral. I had a meeting in Florida a few weeks ago: we were 45 minutes late because of traffic and could not reach the client (who was very religious, another hard thing coming from Europe). When we arrived (my colleague being stressed, me not so much) the client was not even there and came in 1 hour after that. Not sure if it is NYC and Silcon Valley or whatever: the rest of the world do not seem to care as much as some people do here (who seem to get actually angry which proves my point: you will die young if you care about things so insignificant). Imho ofcourse.

Obviously, being late in itself does not make you any more or any less successful, so there must be something more to it. If you find being on time is stressful, perhaps it was a good idea to embrace your lateness, though.

Well it's not the being on time itself, but because everything is punctual, the whole concept of being late gets stressful. And this is not 'just me' if you see aggression in traffic because people 'are late', if you see people running in supermarkets and sweating waiting in the cash register line. If you see people running in sweaty suits across London to make some meetings; you cannot tell me you get nice and relaxed by that. Yet most of us do it.

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