We're judged by others all the time. If you're comfortable with what you've achieved and how you live your life then it shouldn't matter[1], you can't please everyone all of the time.
Nonetheless, there's a reasonable cohort of people[2] out there who although superficially successful do not feel like they're achieving what they'd like to achieve. The article is targeted at this group of people.
[1] If the judgment of others makes you unhappy with your life then there's a reasonable chance that you're not actually happy with it.
In fact, if they are happy with their life they could easily be considered more successful than someone that gets ahead in the marketplace. There are many people who have achieved what society thinks of as success, but are never satisfied.
Of course..there is no motivation to judge and compare people. The tone of the article (and the discussion in the comments) makes it clear that it is our responsibility to live to our full potential - leading to some "extra capacity" that we can use to make this world a wee better place.
It may be too much to ask, may be. But I am hopeful and will continue to ask :)
>> it is our responsibility to live to our full potential - leading to some "extra capacity"
Exactly my point. Living life to their full potential depends on every person. It might be that the "extra capacity" other people do doesn't involve technology or something big. It might be spending time with their family...who knows?
Yes, that choice is always there. One can always say that it is best to simply make "their world" better.
No one can force other person to "contribute." It is voluntary but the point of the article is to trigger some thinking so that a few people who are on the fence on this topic will jump to the right side of the fence.
"Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile."
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe the way to look at this is without regard to smartness.
There are plenty of people with average or even below average IQs that are successful.
They may be successful at things that challenge them intellectually, but have none of the inhibitions or problems described in this post, so they are able to take action in their chosen sphere, continually learn the required lessons and succeed.
A life is mediocre or not based on the conditions and constraints within which someone lives.
Someone who has to put off a vacation for 5 months because he only has 2 weeks' vacation each year, instead of going when he wants to, has a mediocre life. Someone who moves out of the city into a boring suburb because he can't afford a place in the city where he can raise kids is living a mediocre life.
It's not about money per se. There are people making $500,000 per year who live mediocre, depressing, subordinate lives. And there are people making a small fraction of that who have great lives. It's about having the resources and access to live life on your own terms rather than someone else's.
Okay, so, I live in San Francisco, but in an unfashionable neighborhood. Please tell me if I'm living a mediocre life or not.
Perhaps I have misunderstood you, but you're basically saying that if there's some constraint at all on my life, it's mediocre. Seriously, fuck that. There's always someone with more freedom. This is hardly more enlightened than keeping-up-with-the-neighbors.
What it's really about is accepting constraints with grace. And a big part of that is knowing yourself well enough that you can make the right choices.
It's more complicated than that, obviously. If the constraints exist because they provide some absolute value, then they're not so bad. For example, neither of us can fly by our own power, but that's a constraint associated with being human instead of another animal, which has some obvious benefits.
Everything worth doing imposes constraints-- working, raising a family. The question is whether those are constraints that add value for you or for someone else. For example, if you choose only to take 2 weeks of vacation per year because you're very interested in seeing the results of a project you're working on, the constraint is paid off by the benefit. If you can't take serious vacation because your company won't allow it, but you could easily do so otherwise with no serious compromise to your work, it's a constraint that is of no benefit to you-- only to someone else.
My point is this: how many companies, when offering $100k for 50 worked weeks (e.g. 2 weeks' paid vacation), would allow someone to take $90k and have 7 weeks' vacation, or $80k and 12? Very few.
Not too many would work on that kind of system. But you'd be surprised what you can negotiate for when taking a job. 6 weeks of vacation is not entirely unheard of, even in the U.S., even for U.S. companies.
But it doesn't scale quite like that. Ideally, your presence in the company is creating value for the company. And I don't mean in some kind of intrinsic sense. I mean in real dollars.
A person making $100k for a company better be making the company at least that much money - they should be making at least 1.5x their salary for the company to stay in business and the company is probably betting they are worth 2x their salary. It's not just your salary or salary + benefits, but the loss the company will realize by you not being there in terms of lost sales (which is what it all ends up as in general, it's what everybody in the company is working towards, even the janitorial staff). So negotiating a $10k pay cut for 5 more weeks of vacation looses the company $10-30k off the bottom line.
Vacation is there because it costs the company more to not give you vacation (burn-out, sloppy work, quitting, smaller employment pool, etc.) than to give it to you. So they strike a balance and say "2 weeks will keep our employees minimally happy without costing us too much money in the end".
If you don't like that, there are plenty of part-time jobs you can apply for -- some even pay pretty well. I'd wager most companies would be thrilled to hire most of their employees P/T because then they don't have to provide benefits and they don't have to worry about keeping their people occupied for every hour they charge. No work? Go home.
If I had to define a mediocre life I'd define it as a life where there are things you want to achieve but you aren't trying to achieve them because you're afraid of failure. It's more of an internal mental state than anything.
I work pretty much whatever hours I want and can walk to most things I use on a daily or weekly basis: groceries (including fresh meats and veggies from the local farmers), eat out at restaurants from fast food to 3-star (two in my neighborhood actually), get dry cleaning done if I need to, take care of shipping stuff, take in a movie, see a doctor, dentist, chiropractor or orthodontist. I can also walk to a pretty nice neighborhood park only the folks in my development can use without crossing any major roads. It's about 40 acres, with a water fall, a pond, two tennis courts, exercise equipment, playgrounds for kids, jogging trail and miscellaneous other sundry -- mostly covered in trees and greenery. We have three swimming pools in my neighborhood, one where no kids are allowed. Twice a month we have a farmer's market in the parking lot of the bank I walk to in 5 minutes. On the 4th of July my neighborhood puts on a private fireworks show.
Every home in my neighborhood has fiber optic internet, phone and television. We had it before FiOS was even a term.
I'm 5 minutes from a reservoir and nature preserve. On any given night I can spend maybe 5-10 minutes of travel time to see live music, take in a play, see a concert or get on a 45 mile long dedicated bike trail. 10-15 minutes from my house I can buy pretty much anything a person can buy, from a Porsche to discount socks, can play golf at at least 6 golf courses, have a world class indoor swimming facility inside of a nature preserve and park, and my eating venues and choices expand by a magnitude of 10 including everything from budget priced French Cuisine to Korean bar food. I have half a dozen ethnic groceries within 20 minutes travel time from my house, two world class performance venues, a college campus (soon to be two more), ample jobs and industry in everything from hi-tech to agriculture (I live in Wine Country). I'm close enough to a major international airport that If I travel someplace, I can call my wife when I land to come pick me up at the airport, and she'll be there by the time I collect my baggage.
And in 3 years or so I'll have a mass transit stop 5 minutes from my house.
My house is not terribly big, but I and several family members can live there very comfortably and rarely bump elbows, and I spend less than 25% of my income to live there (I'm not rich by any stretch of the term). In the warm months I, get home from work and walk to the grocery and buy and grill lamb, fresh salmon, steaks, asparagus, mushrooms, onions, garlic and other such great things, and eat out on my property every day with a bottle of wine (I'm partial to Chilean Cabs) I brought back from the same grocery. I usually finish up dinner by finishing the wine with some imported cheeses or fresh fruit from the last farmer's market and a cigar.
If I want to enjoy pure nature, it's literally 10 minutes away, and if I want to enjoy an urban environment, I'm 30-40 minutes from the local city center. However, I find myself not going much into the city because there's really not much draw outside of the occasional comedy show or museum. I literally have everything I could ever need at my finger tips, plus I pay less for the privilege than living in the city, and I have 10x the room.
I get 3 weeks vacation per year, I usually split it into two trips. In the last two years I've vacationed literally around the world 3 times. But the rest of the time, I don't really have to take a vacation, because the environment I live in is literally better than any resort I've ever been to except I have to mix my own drinks.
Maybe you call that having a mediocre life. Perhaps, but maybe I'm just satisfied with mediocrity then?
That sounds like an incredibly nice suburb. Most aren't that good. There is nothing walkable from my parent's house. Though they do have FiOS and I can't get it in the city.
We picked the area because of the large numbers of nice amenities very close by. There are about 5000 homes here all with the same kinds of walk-ability. A very nicely designed area. There are areas just a few miles away that weren't designed quite as well.
I'm very glad to be seeing the recent movement in design that calls for walking friendly areas. But with a good understanding that people need to park somewhere as well.
You're missing the point of the parent post. Someone who's moving from the cities to the suburbs for money reasons, even though he wants to live in the city, is living a mediocre life. Someone who lives in the suburbs because they want to and it makes them happy is living the dream. The post may be poorly worded, but it shouldn't be interpreted as "suburbs are boring" but rather "someone who finds suburbs boring but is forced to lived there."
You're right. I was being a bit pedantic about it.
I want a Ferrari and a 300 ft luxury yacht, a private helicopter and jet, eat 4-star meals 3 times daily and a closet full of custom made Italian suits and a private trip to the ISS on board a Russian rocket followed by time in any one of a dozen top-end apartments in major cities around the world. I want those things so bad I can feel it in my bones but because of financial reasons I own a practical family car, take a cruise every so often, fly coach most of the time, eat 4-star only 2-3 times a year and I shop at an outlet mall for my clothes which I keep in my boring suburban closet and when I travel I get a reasonably priced hotel with clean sheets and free breakfast in the lobby.
Am I living a mediocre life because my ambitions have outpaced my bank account?
Not really.
Are those fun things to shoot for as long-term, fantasy filled life goals?
Sure thing. I think that lots of successful people are successful because of a general dissatisfaction with the status quo. Their life is great, but can't it be just a tad better? And I think that's fine as a motivational tool.
But just because I'm not followed around by my own personal string quartet to provide atmosphere while I'm eating lunch doesn't mean playing the same music on my laptop somehow makes my life just oh so not worth it all.
I disagree with the basic sentiment that, "I didn't get everything I wanted, whenever I wanted it, all the time, so I'm living a mediocre life." That's a bunch of nonsense. By this definition, nobody lives beyond a mediocre life. Not the Sultan of Oman, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet or Kim Jong Il.
I think a better definition is this "are you on the path to the things you want? if not, you live a mediocre life." For example, I really want to eat 4-star meals 3 times daily. To do that takes lots and lots of money. I don't eat that way now, but as I move up in the world, I make more money and can thus eat 4-star meals with a higher frequency. I'm pretty satisfied with this. Next year, I plan to eat more 4-star meals than this year. And the year after, likewise.
Now supposing, all I could do is eat at Taco Bell every day (I've been there). I am not on that path. I can't even taste the sauce of a good bœuf bourguignon. I'm living a mediocre life. This motivates me, how do I get my bœuf bourguignon? How can afford to eat at Chez Francois and taste that succulent dish? I would save, but I barely make enough money as is. I know! I'll make more money! How do I do that? And on and on and on....
Eventually, I get on the path and my life is fulfilled. But I may have had to do things that I didn't necessarily want to do. Like work full-time, or take fewer vacation days, or commute an hour each way. Tough, that's life, that's not mediocrity.
May be true. That is all the more reason really smart (and not lazy) people to move to the top and displace the powerful and useless people. Don't you think that would be an answer?
A psychologist once explained to me how powerful and destructive can the fear of success be. In fact most of the time it's latent. Many of those complaining about unluckiness may in reality be afraid of "heights": too much money or fame or both. Usually a result of "money and fame doesn't make you happy" but there may be other, more personal reasons, too. As a latent, subconscious force it may sometimes outweigh the other 9 factors mentioned in the article.
One of the signs you have the fear of success is when you respond emotionally to negative stories about the reach and famous. "See, they are bastards", you say, or other times "they are pathetic". Well, it may be true most of the time, but it's not their problem, it's yours.
I am not sure whether this is exactly fear of success. I think it may be fear of failure, or more specifically fear of discovering that one does not have talent.
For example, take somebody that is smart, is a great conservationist in parties, makes great jokes and has read the entire literary cannons of several countries. All his friends say he should be a writer. He has always dreamed of being a writer. Yet he never starts writing. Is that fear of success? Or fear of trying and discovering that despite everything he did not have talent?
Anyway, while we are on the subject linked below is a hilarious episode of Black Books that is about this. BTW I think the main character of that show is someone like the person in my example.
No, it's fear of success. "If I do well, they will expect more of me, and I don't want to deal with taht, however if i fail or only do OK, they will leave me alone". It is fundamentally a fear of others expectations.
In some particular cases - yes, you are afraid of going too high because the fall would be most painful. But still there may be, for example, some (latent or not) religious fears of too much wealth.
That sounds like Freud, who is pretty much discredited on everything. There's really no evidence for "latent" or "subconscious" processes that are analogous to conscious processes, such as fear. Fear is always pretty damn conscious.
I think it's also important to keep in mind that the topic in the article is heavily weighed towards financial success (and conversely, financial nowhere-ness).
There are plenty of ways to "go somewhere, be someone, and do remarkable things" without using smarts and luck as a means to wealth. It just takes time to realize that the standard definition of success is mostly a rat race.
Then again, this comes from someone who loves capitalism and is an entrepreneur wanna-be, so take my words for what they're worth.
Yeah. I am tired of the get rich quick crowd. The best way to get rich on the internet is to sell 'how to get rich on the internet' advice to people who want to get rich on the internet.
I've been a software developer at internet startups for 15 years and never made anything beyond my (frequently minimal) salary (me=bad negotiator), but it was usually fun, challenging and I've learned a lot. But I've never claimed to be smart. The most money I ever made was something that had nothing to do with the internet (real estate) that a friend of mine talked me into against my better judgement. And the only reason I made any money at all was because I'm such a pessimist that I sold right before everything crashed.
Owyn, the article was not focused on "richness" from a money perspective. Success simply meant you have an "increased capacity to contribute to the world around you."
If financial success isn't your goal in doing what you do then I'm wrong and I apologize. My career is about code. My life "beyond it" is not about "business" and it's quite happy, thank you very much. That's the last thing I care about and it's not my fucking problem. Most of the companies I've worked for have gone out of business. This is hacker news. I am comfortable being the angry pessimist in the cave who snipes at others.
Owyn, I couldn't reply to your last reply as there was no reply option there :(
Yes, you are welcome to be angry and be pessimistic or in whatever mood you choose to be. And it's OK to disagree too. I never claim to know all the answers anyway :)
My comments were mostly "meta". There has been a rash of entrepreneur bs here lately and I'm sick of it. I much prefer the NoSQL posts. However. To get to the meat of your post, I have personally (meaning, in my personal life) encountered issues with 1,3,6,9 which I have overcome to one extent or another. Or not. So whatever. Fuck it. I'm going to sleep. Good luck with your whatevers, I have to write a bunch of code tomorrow.
Lunaru, there is a discussion in the comments section in the blog about the kind of success ( "increased capacity to contribute to the world around you" )
I could not move those comments to the main post just to keep the post to a reasonable size :)
The "somewhere" metric is different for everyone. Aspiring towards different things doesn't mean you went nowhere. For instance, I just released my first bit of open source code. I feel like I've finally reached a goal. Hence, I went somewhere.
I'm actually quite tired of people telling other people how to be successful. First, it's quite a vain goal.
Second, and more importantly, consciously knowing what actions lead to success/failure does not translate into one taking/avoiding those actions (e.g. most people understand that flattery may be insincere, yet many people fall prey to it. Nearly everyone know about honesty being the "best policy", and yet humans across the centuries have deceived (and have been caught)).
What would be more useful would be a "n ways to always practice what your mom told you". Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational is a great start in the direction, but I doubt we'll ever find all the hacks to cure our innate stupidity.
Yes I agree that one should "follow their heart" to go somewhere. One thing to remember is that as the "awareness" of what is possible with their potential changes, their heart will start yearning for reaching that potential.
So, who you are with and what conversations you have on a daily basis will have a huge influence on what your heart will say.
Thank you. For those that are ultra-curious about this, please make it a point to read "The Biology of Belief" by Bruce Lipton. Quick summary there is - "Garbage in; Garbage Out." :)
This is true, but if it's an implied deficiency in the original post, I disagree. Both here and at the blog, there have been many defensive comments along the lines of "well, maybe they're happy with their lives and we shouldn't judge them". The author specifically addressed that in the very first paragraph:
> When you talk to them, you will realize that even they want to go somewhere, be someone and do remarkable things.
The post should be read in that context. There are a tremendous number of smart people leading mediocre lives, not because of choice, but because of bad decision making.
There is a gap between where they are and where they wish they were. They want something better, where better is defined strictly in terms of their own desires, but they can't make better happen. And the follow-on points laid out by the author are among the most common roadblocks these folks encounter.
And what's wrong with going "nowhere in life", then? What the hell is this "mediocre life" and how could anyone define it for anyone but for himself only?
If there were external standards who could define what's best for me and what should I become? Who could do that especially if I'm smart, smarter than most?
On the other hand, if the author didn't only talk about smart people who he thinks live a mediocre life but also about smart people who themselves think they live a mediocre life, the article could just have been renamed as "Smart People Not Happy With Their Lives Either".
When I was in my 20s, I ran across a man who'd been a 'successful' salesman for 15 years. He made a special point to tell me how he regretted all the time he'd spent away from home and not being around to see his kids grow up.
We all have different ways of evaluating our satisfaction and what fulfills us. I'd rather fail at a difficult task than succeed at a simpler one... because the difficult one engages me, the simpler one bores me.
I'd rather take a walk in the woods than drive a Lamborghini. Rather read a good book than take an expensive trip to see yet another pile of rocks.
There are 3 golden triangles of success one can examine, whereby an increase in 1 factor puts pressure for an increase in another. These triangles are:
project: scope, time, budget
ego: fame, fortune, power
wellbeing: health, family relations, work life
For work, this means a happy work life, that is, doing the work one does best, doing it well, not overdoing it, and being paid appropriately: maximizing flow. So work in the wellbeing triangle is a reward, not a burden.
Here are some rules:
- within a triangle, if you increase 1 factor, it leads to an increase in another, but if you increase it too much it leads to cessation in another, or a decrease. EG: pump too much money into a project, and too many people may be hired and deadlines are missed.
- too much pressure in a triangle will force a period of chaos until a new triangle can be formed with higher capacity. EG: your family relations may be so great that you can have more children but you are not making enough money to allow it, so family relations can have limits until work life improves.
- there are connections between the triangles, but the links are uncertain. EG: one person may trash their family relations and work life in order to experience a benefit of fame. This may in turn lead to new relations more relevant to that fame, and then a better family life.
My point: success is multi-factored. Success in one area doesn't necessarily mean success in other areas. Also, the road to success itself is a meta-success not to be overlooked.
Leaving aside the fact that it is really hard to judge and distinguish between "nowhere" and "somewhere", is there any evidence that a significant number smart folks go nowhere? More than 20%? More than 50%? 80%? 90%?
In my experience (anecdotal), smart people tend to share two distinct features: they are lazy and they are effective. They are only as lazy as being effective allows them to be. By effective I mean that they attain their desired outcomes.
In short, most smart people go where they want to go.
I'll just say I agree with some of the points mentioned in the article, but here are some my additions:
Always have segmented goals. For instance, I have a few for the next 6 months (learn a couple new programming languages, hit the gym 5 days a week, get a faster time on my 5000 meter run), and always focus on them; they will change, some times you'll pick up a new 6 month goal, or it may extend to another segment, but always have a short time span where you are improving yourself and your skills in some way, always.
Then have focus on the 2 to 5 year goal span, where you are slowly acquiring a larger set of skills sets that work in tandem to meet a more complex goal set. For instance, getting a side project profitable and running. Doing this could include a series of 6 months goals that work together to reach that 2 year goal (getting more unix admin experience, finishing your nth business/marketing book, creating a network of partner and commercial relationships).
Then you always have a set of goals that you want to reach 10 or 20 years from now, that are a solid mix of personal and professional ambitions that you know are attainable if you plan ahead.
Everything takes time, and the worst thing you can do is wasting it by not focusing on what needs to be done now in order to move to the next stage in life.
Not to mention doing all of this while maintaining a good spirit, sane mind, physical fitness, and personal fulfillment.
It's all possible, but you have to keep your eye on the prize, watch out for pitfalls, and don't let minor setbacks derail your ultimate ambitions. It's all incremental. You can't do everything at once, otherwise you set yourself up for failure. You must work slowly, realizing those progressions, and building on them until you're living the dream.
Here is a fun trick: imagine Bernard Madoff, Kenneth Lay, or George Bush Jr. reading this. All of these people "went somewhere", but I certainly don't aspire to be any of them.
"What if you become a really lousy President of the United States" doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling argument for not trying to go somewhere.
Did George Bush go "somewhere"? Most people by going "somewhere", want to significantly grow from where their parents put them, which includes doing a lot better than their parents. George Bush's Dad was already president before him. Though I guess George Bush Jr. did manage 8 years rather than the 4 years is father did - this is only a modest improvement.
I really like your posts, Rajesh! When I first found your blog here on HN I just kept reading.
With that said, I think a lot of people don't really understand what you mean, perhaps because they have their own pre-conceived notions of what success is, or they might think that you look kind of slick with that shirt and sunglasses on... ;)
I think what Rajesh is after is that our world is a mess right now (at least this is what I feel) because lots of smart people/people with leadership qualities/creative people born in the 30s/40s/50s have spent their energy on things that are good for themselves, while not advancing the world.
If many smart people do what they can to make the world a little bit better, we will get a huge payoff.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. That was the first thing I thought of when I read this. Although Gladwell doesn't specifically point out 9 points in his book, most of these points can be easily inferred from the anecdotes that Gladwell presents.
This seems to equate "smart" with academic success. What about the smart people who are not academically successful? Some of them go somewhere; others go nowhere, but they'd have a different profile.
One that I've seen all over the place:
10. A smart person with the misfortune of ending up in the average class is likely to be noticed by a teacher and put on the honors track. A smart person who ends up in a mediocre department of a mediocre company (lack of ambition, poor interviewing skills, geography, low self-esteem) is likely to fail out, and have a damaged resume after doing so. He's now competing against fresh 22-year-olds, and he's a 24-year-old who worked some unimpressive accounting job and got fired.
School is designed to notice and nurture talent. Sometimes it fails, but it makes a solid and noble effort, and probably succeeds more often than it fails. By contrast, the corporate world is much less interested in, or capable with, this process, because business people are generally bad at telling apart the few who actually are talented from the many who think they are. Also, the corporate world is only interested in nurturing talent that satisfies an immediate need of the business.
