I like Graham's points about overconfidence, peer groups and (judicious amounts of) ignorance, all of which he champions quite strongly. But drilling deeper on "rate of change" is an undervalued element that deserves a closer look.
The best innovators are really good at taking Version 1.0 and figuring out what rework will turn it into a better 2.0, and then 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, etc. This is an identifiable skill! It can be cultivated. Once you've got it, the failings of Version 1.0 do not ruin your self-esteem. You just get to work on fixing them. And not enough people think about this systematically.
One of my favorite museum stops of all time was the British Library, where a glass case held Paul McCartney's first draft of "Yesterday." You could see, cross-out by cross-out, how a somewhat awkward ballad got turned into a pop classic.
I'll submit that almost everything that looks like genius from a distance is a lot of step-by-step craft when viewed more closely. I did some consulting at Facebook in 2008 and it was quite amazing seeing how rapidly and incessantly Team Zuckerberg was not just adding features, but also rejiggering the way the feed worked; the layout, the everything.
Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into.
> Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into.
Yeah...but the other side of that depends on what the definition of “dodgy” is.
For example, say we have a server-based app. If the DB schema is badly-designed (usually overcomplicated), then we are truly pooched, as we’ll start to figure that out after we have a few thousand users.
If the DB design is OK, even if it is primitive and simple, then we can have naive, problematic code, yet plenty of room to grow.
I’ve learned to design for the unknown. It’s really paid off, for me, but YMMV.
If course everything is tradeoffs. Thinking in a binary known/unknown is not helpful. I prefer probabilities wherever possible.
Choosing your bias depends on your field. In a safety critical field, you rather want to be safe than sorry. In web development, move fast and break things. This isn't hard though. You usually know which side you prefer when in doubt.
There are two places where it is possible to see early, "lame" work. One is YouTube - most channels with well-made videos would retain their earliest works, and the first few dozen can be quite instructive.
Second is GitHub - the first few hundred commits of many successful open-source projects. It is a wonder to see sprawling codebases starting at its first commit, and plodding its way over years before gathering momentum.
I'm curious though: the AirBnB website is often presented as how unprofessional-looking an MVP can be, but contextually, it didn't look super horrible compared to the websites of the time. Here's a bunch of "professional websites" in 2008.
I think expectations have evolved and the minimum standards of aesthetics in 2020 presents a higher bar. I wonder if an MVP that looked like that would work in 2020? I'm guessing the bar these days is at least a Bootstrap UI.
Those websites are so cute, particularly Airbnb's :) It's always great to see fledgling companies distinguish their business proposition to a market that doesn't even know about them yet.
Webcomics work that way - quite a few webcomics have been written over the course of many years, and you can see the art style slowly changing and the artist's skill improving.
You don't notice it if you're subscribing/following the comic, until you jump back to an earlier strip and see how much less skilled the early work was.
One of my favorite podcasts [1] is a great example of this. A friend recommended it to me and told me to start at the beginning (already a couple years of back catalog at that point). I almost stopped after the first few episodes, which were interesting but not very well produced.
The creator stuck with it though and the quality improved dramatically and pretty quickly.
Still, it's crazy how much video has improved in quality, and exploded in popularity, since just 2009 or 2013 ... damn.
I guess this is a little like early bloggers in the early 2000's who were already writers in other mediums.
The people who are really successful are the ones involved in the old paradigm (multiple TV shows in Rogan's case), AND who actually embrace the new paradigm.
Foot note number 8 of the essay notes that Michael Nielsen made the same two observations when reading an early version of the essay. For some reason Paul Graham has decided to make the footnote labels almost invisible in the text of the essay. I agree that it is best that in short essay reading that skipping the footnotes until reading the whole essay is usually the best way to approach them, but I like when they were more visable. In the spirit of the essay though, it is nice he has not changed older essays to fit this new style and one can go back and see the footnote indicators get lighter over time.
I had one thought forming while reading this piece, then read to Carmack's quote in the footnote which encapsulated it. I learned how to program modding games as a teenager, and as an adult now looking back on it, I realize how rough and ready the game engines were in 1996-1998, and how that rough and ready state, combined with my teenager's imbalance between time and money, led to a bunch of what Graham is calling early work where my bad 3d modeling skills, terrible art sense, and ability to sling values around in text files and use tools that other community members made, allowed me to make an entire faction for Total Annihilation that was clearly lower quality than the originals, but really not that much worse. Contrast that to about 2017 when I looked into what it would take to make a very small mod for XCOM, and boy oh boy, so much more work. What advantages I gained from being in that place at that time...
This is an important and often overlooked aspect to creativity.
When people get into some thing, they naturally compare themselves to the people out there that are best at that thing. In Ye Olden days before the Internet and social media meant literally the world's best examples of every single thing were right at your fingertips, the "best" often meant "the best in your town" and the level of difference between your novice skill and that was not so great as to be disheartening.
But now, the first day you ever decide to fry an egg, you can watch Gordon Ramsey and Jacques Pépin do it and watch your soul die with the realization that you'll never reach that level. Or you pick up a guitar, then go to YouTube and see some kid who's been practicing twelve hours a day since infancy and lose all hope.
A somewhat perverse trick to combat that is what I think of as low ceilings. If the thing you get into has some limit to how good you can be at it, then the difference between you and the world's best isn't so great that it kills your motivation. I'm an ex-game developer, and I've seen how many people really love PICO-8 and other deliberately constrained game making environments. I think a big part of that is because when you're making a PICO-8 game, you aren't comparing yourself to the world's best games, but just to the best PICO-8 games. Those can be surprisingly impressive too, but they don't feel so unattainably distant from your own first steps.
If you don't want to choose a medium that is instrinsically limited, another approach is to find a scene. Find a group of like-minded individuals at roughly the same skill level as you. Enough better than you to inspire you, but not so far that you don't feel you could ever reach their level. Immerse yourself in that group, an you'll naturally compare yourself to them and not the world at large.
Back when I used to be in a band, we played shows in small venues with other local bands. I knew we were never going to be the next Oasis or Tom Petty, but "Orlando's third-best rock band" was close enough within reach to be worth striving for, and it really helped keep me going.
> Or you pick up a guitar, then go to YouTube and see some kid who's been practicing twelve hours a day since infancy and lose all hope.
on the flip side, most skills seem to respond asymptotically to practice/effort (rapid progress at the beginning, diminishing returns near the top). the very best guitar players in the world are not radically more technically proficient than the classical/jazz guitarists at your local conservatory. you can see this in esports a lot. players come out of the woodwork all the time who have trained hard and smart at a game for two or three years and dethrone people who have literally been playing since they were eight.
being the world's best X is usually more about gaining proficiency in adjacent skills Y and Z and having a bit of luck than it is about being lightyears ahead of everyone else at X itself. this is how roger federer dominated tennis for so long. he wasn't the world's best at any one stroke, but each one of his strokes was among the best, and he invested heavily in a style of play that was uncommon on the tour at that time.
>> Or you pick up a guitar, then go to YouTube and see some kid who's been practicing twelve hours a day since infancy and lose all hope.
On the other hand, that same thing can inspire you.
I was never a musically inclined kid in any way, shape or form. Nobody in my family played, I never had an instrument as a child, but when I heard Days of the New for the first time, I ran to Guitar Center and bought an acoustic.
For about a month, I practiced and played and played. I never got anywhere, gave up after a month, and looking back on it, I should have realized that level of playing was going to be years away, even if I had a professional teacher. But I didn't care at the time.
I think the trick is to have achievable targets (I am beginner), simple strumming, chords progression. Just like PICO-8 advice above or "hello world". At least half of the time I play to enjoy myself, the songs that inspired me "BRUTTO - Вечірнє сонце" [1], "Green Day - Good Riddance", "Oasis - Wonderwall".
It is extremely important to tune guitar perfectly. I tune it before each session and found it usually got slightly out of tune if I don't enjoy playing anymore. It is surprisingly hard to sing while playing, it fills mind while hands gets practice.
It is easy to excel in first months because there is not much yet. Playing without looking at guitar, working on posture, accurate timing (not tempo!). Find something to enjoy, Brushy One String plays one string and it drives [1] .
Scene is another big thing, and in the article, Graham draws on SV as a scene, too. That community can be really sustaining, even when you move past the organizing reason. I have not modded Total Annihilation in nearly 20 years, but I still post on the community forum at times because of the people still there.
I had the same experience except modding Motocross Madness and Carmageddon.
Carmageddon was especially easy to mod because it was all self-documented data files in .txt format [1] and you could mess with literally everything from graphics to physics.
The huge difference between this and now is that if I wanted to mess around with any kind of game I would need an IDE - which for a kid without a technical parent/mentor/friend would be a non-starter.
I've never heavily modded anything, but I made some mods for Skyrim and Fallout 4. In that case, the game engine is anticipating the extensions, so it's a bit easier. Add in community tools and it was stupid easy to do any sort of scripting alterations to a game. I can only imagine the complexity you have to grapple with when wading into a modern game not built to enable it.
Modding is definitely one of those things that has become harder. Often due to lack of availability but definitely in terms of skill level to get near a similar quality bar.
But at the same time it's never been easier to make a game from scratch in a whole host of different and easy to use engines.
> Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?
> A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
> And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.
> And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
That video is one of my favorites as it really hits home for me when I try to learn something new. You can know what makes something good, but you don't quite have the muscle memory or skill to reproduce it and it's frustrating.
You might know what a good painting looks like, but you can't move your arm in the right way to create those strokes. You don't know how to mix the paints to get the colors you want. When you are sketching out a scene, you're not quite adept at positioning elements of a scene on the page to have the aesthetics you're aiming for.
Another thing this reminds me of is learning how to dance. It's easy to watch someone walk through steps and mentally you know exactly how they are moving, but you just can't quite move your body in the same way. Super frustrating! What's worse is the first time you watch a video of you dancing. There's a huge disconnect between how you think you look and how you actually look and it's quite discouraging.
IMO this has little to do with “taste” and more to do with analytical/critical ability. The more experienced and knowledgeable you become in a creative endeavor, the easier it is to self-critique and (especially in visual art) see mistakes. When you’re starting out drawing for example, you literally can’t see your mistakes. You intuitively know it sucks but you don’t know exactly why. Figuring out that last part puts you on the road to mastery.
The rest is accurate though. It does take a lot of grit and working through lots and lots of bad stuff. Developing a creative talent can be a pretty horrible experience because of that ;P
> You intuitively know it sucks but you don’t know exactly why
I think that is what the GP is referring to as "taste". You already have that intuitive sense that some things suck and others are good. What you need to develop, as you say, is being able to tell exactly why something isn't good when it isn't, so you can fix it.
I think what Glass misses in the grandparent post is that this analytical/critical ability is not innate, but acquired along with the performance skill, and at times the analytical ability gets ahead of the skill.
Many years ago, when I was in a youth choir and we were practicing a lot for a festival, I asked our director why we sounded worse at each practice. His explanation was that we actually sounded better, but that our analytical abilities developed even quicker than our singing skills.
It can be discouraging, even if you know this is true for so many people, though, to see the "young genius" types. They're exceptions to almost every rule by definition, but it can be hard to remember that when you see someone years or decades younger burst onto the scene and seem to eclipse what you can do with far less effort.
But yes, it's important to remember that even in fields with famous examples of luminaries like that, there are still countless other experts who practiced and practiced and continually got better to achieve their expertise out of willpower more than sheer transcendent prodigy.
> But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?
I've always told people interested in startup to "start a project, not a company." I haven't been able to verbalize why yet until this:
But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.
How can you know that such an impulse is part of some country’s national culture?
I sometimes think about what sets successful and less successful countries apart, and how profound an effect can cultures have. Assuming that smart people are born everywhere at similar rate, and disregarding unfree societies with authoritative regimes or paralysing religious dogmas, I would naively expect similar outcomes among countries. I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture, but I guess I will never know.
In Denmark it's so prevalent that it's codified as Jante's Law. It's not a prescriptive law, despite the way it's phrased. It's more descriptive, a satirical summary of the way Danes think of ambitious people.
- You're not to think you are anything special.
- You're not to think you are as good as we are.
- You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
- You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
- You're not to think you know more than we do.
- You're not to think you are more important than we are.
I may be misinterpreting it here. Although a few points (see point no. 6, 8, 9) help one stay grounded and humble, the other points can be seen as degrading the self-worth of an ambitious person.
In New Zealand, we call it Tall Poppy Syndrome. The typical acceptable way to be successful in NZ without receiving ostracisation in some form is to attribute your success to the country, rather than to yourself.
At a very basic level, it affects children at school. To excel at school is looked down on, here, which leads to the smart kids keeping their heads down and trying to fit in with the average kids. One benefit of immigration from countries with higher approval of academic success is that in many schools you are no longer looked down on for doing well, and I look forward to seeing how that affects the future of my country.
I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture
I believe you can have a grasp of the magnitude of it by thinking that people are the product of their birth (genes and whatever) and their experience. Certainly we can think of experience as very significative in the way people act and think. Also if you replace the word experience by education (see as being the same thing here), you end up with anything from study environment, to culture to politics that actually determine a lot how people behave.
That's actually my main criticism of the politics in my country. It's not so much that the politicians are saying dumb things, they actually are great people if you look closely. It's just that their politic is not how I would "educate" people, the way people experiences it is the bad part in my feeling.
In short, I think those impulses have a lot to do with experience/education.
> How can you know that such an impulse is part of some country’s national culture?
Singaporean here. I've seen this "crabs in a bucket" mentality since the days of formal education. It's often known as being "kiasu" (afraid of losing to others, in Hokkien dialect) [1] in the 90's.
These days, it's sometimes known as the "sinkie pwn sinkie" phenomenon [2].
> Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem clever.
It's ~100x harder to create than critique. I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?" People will freely tell you the latter, but rarely the former.
> I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?"
A recurring thought I've had for years: the latter -- "why won't this work?" -- seems like a fairly common mindset for Eastern European engineers schooled in the 1960s. Brilliant people who need to understand everything to the bare essentials. And -- they produce strikingly simple solutions to almost every technical problem in the house.
Fairly often, though, this mindset seems to come with quite a complicated, uneasy personality.
My dad was a kind person, but I remember something he said about his civil engineering studies in the 1970s Soviet Union: for certain exams, not a single mistake was allowed. One wrong answer, and you failed. For if you build a house and miscalculate (e.g.) the needed strength of a crucial beam, you'll risk with fatalities.
I'm not an engineer, and I've always been in the "why might this work" boat myself. But I do understand this critical view precisely for that reason. For a lot of occupations, there is no unlimited Ctrl+Z.
That's my standard approach to work, I always try to invalidate an idea before investing my time (or the team's time) in it. If we can't invalidate the idea I feel much more confident that we're going in the right direction.
On the other hand a lot of people spend too much energy trying to support the idea, which often is a reflection of confirmation bias / wishful thinking in their thought process.
Invalidating an idea is a bad idea because old ideas are bad until they’re suddenly very good. For example, before Napoleon, cannons were often a terrible idea: unreliable and rarely decisive. Then the technology caught up to the idea.
Which is why it is good to know why things are bad so you know when they no longer applies. If you just try to be positive then you'd try to use cannons when they were still not good enough to be practical on the field.
> old ideas are bad until they’re suddenly very good
Sure, for an idea to become suddenly very good you either have to rely on technology advancements / innovation, as in the case for cannons that before Napoleon were unreliable and dangerous, or you have to make a controlled bet to test your hypothesis, as in the case of Venture Capital that invests in hundreds of startups (selected according to their investment model) estimating that a small percentage of them will turn out successful.
So my key point is, if an idea becomes very good (i.e. through innovation) it'll be harder to invalidate it, and if you invest in an idea that you aren't comfortable with yet (i.e. venture capital) there'll be a higher risk attached to it.
> as in the case of Venture Capital that invests in hundreds of startups (selected according to their investment model) estimating that a small percentage of them will turn out successful.
This. VCs have an endless supply of disposable entrepreneurs in their portfolio.
For every 1 person that has PG's version of edgy, devil-may-care entrepreneurialism and succeeds, there's 99 that fail. VCs operate more like brokers than entrepreneurs. The only place they're not playing a numbers game is in fostering business connections and hiring.
Acting as if the SV financial Goliath is David is just, I dunno, old. That assembly line has been cranking out the same "apply software to an existing problem" model for a long time now. And they do it because it works, and actually building things takes longer, has less leverage because of up-front capital, and is much higher risk (and taxation).
I think removing frictions from starting new things & automating the mundane things like project setup, doc setup etc. goes along way to cross the bridge from 'wanting to build something' to 'building it'.
Working in public on anything is very useful too as there is a long time inbetween making something and 'truly releasing' something. I remember the talk on how https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent started off as a simple readme. Got lots of interest & comments and only then was the idea validated and got built on, already with community.
This is unfortunately, me.. I've slowly come to the conclusion of not using to avoid it completely (that's to hard), but rather timebox it when i catch myself drifting
"Many a-times, brilliant young people join an organisation and want to start right at the top or at a glamorous role. They get aggrieved when they are not given the shiny, glamorous role that commands respect or gives social proof. This tends to result in them doing a poor job of whatever role they have been given.
I posit that we can learn from the Tesla story described above. Take the job and prove yourself once an opportunity presents itself. It might not be what you envisioned last year before the pandemic and lockdown. It’s important to get into the door and then set the standards to where you believe you belong."
I think Tesla was right, but the attitude issue reflects on the individual's mindset (in addition to the focus issue he aptly described). Some people will do any job to the best of their ability, whether it's sweeping the floors or managing a company; others will continually lust after the more prestigious position, and never accomplish the tasks at hand.
I'm your target audience, seeing as this year was my first year in the workforce and I'm young.
I don't see the point in trying to prove yourself in most situations, since most organizations have little opportunity.
I just quit my first tech job. The first team I was on had very little agency and was basically told what to do, the second team I was on had an "architect" who dictated how everything was going to be.
Without going into boring details, I was told by management and other team members I was doing well and it showed compared to most of the other Juniors I worked with.
I don't want a glamorous role, or one that gives me social proof. I just want to have some agency and the opportunity to take on responsibility and advance.
I found it easier to extend in Product Ownership direction. Resolving use cases with customers (like writing test cases against reference Excel computation, legacy SQL dump), filling stories, writing documentation. It results in natural leadership.
I don't know your story but I've been tech lead in a team with to many juniors, bad idea. I've struggled to give them agency, they were arguing about placing spaces and braces, there were cases of designing not so great API, mutating frameworks private variables and defending as "own vision". Promising juniors left, I've left.
Finding good team is hard. It is often ruined by management.
> But the most conspicuous feature of Theranos's cap table is the absence of Silicon Valley firms. Journalists were fooled by Theranos, but Silicon Valley investors weren't.
Tim Draper was friends with Holmes's family and his kids grew up with hers. He invested personally, but I don't think his firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson did.
Theranos' fundraising was primarily from outside of SV: "Documents unsealed in a lawsuit brought against Theranos reveal a number of the high profile investors who had a stake in the nearly worthless start-up: The Waltons, founders of Walmart, with $150 million; Rupert Murdoch, with $125 million; and the DeVos family, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, with $100 million. The investments were made between 2013 and 2015, according to the Journal." - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/theranos-devos-other-investo...
DFJ put in $500,000. At their scale, that's chump change. They can safely invest that much money even in companies that are unlikely to succeed. And IIUC, Theranos wasn't a fraud at that point—there was still genuine hope that their product would work.
pg, and others pushing back against the Theranos-as-an-indictment-of-Silicon-Valley-venture-capital narrative, are talking about the firms that invested much larger sums after Elizabeth Holmes had gotten a lot of good press and become a hot commodity (and, in most cases, after she'd started engaging in fraud, unbeknownst to most). Those firms lost their shirts in a way that DFJ didn't.
Pushing back on Theranos-as-an-indictment-of-Silicon-Valley-venture-capital is a fine point to make, but that's not the point he made. He said Theranos' cap table had an "absence of Silicon Valley firms", which is false. Also DFJ is not the only SV firm that invested. So did Larry Ellison in the $28.5M Series C. This is all very easy to find information.
It seems like a weird point to nit-pick, but in most of PG's essays, there are so few demonstrably easy-to-disprove facts. This one is easy. And the misplaced hubris in thinking zero SV firms were foolish enough to invest in a fraud makes you question all his other assertions.
The early stage of Theranos wasn't really a scam, they tried to build the actual product. The scam started when they failed to do so and then lied about it.
"It also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident."
You do not need to cultivate this personality trait in our culture. Far more people go too far with this than not far enough, myself included.
Overconfident people believe they know more than they actually do, so they are more eager to criticize your novel idea. This is the type of thinking Graham says he wants to avoid in earlier paragraphs.
Instead of cultivating overconfidence through the deadly sin of pride, we should cultivate increasing true confidence through the cardinal virtue of courage. You can build your confidence by taking greater and greater courageous action. Courage is the choice to confront pain, ridicule, and the unknown all for an uncertain reward.
Graham says, "being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own." Acting courageously does this much, much better. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if Graham agreed. The rest of the essay does a pretty good job explaining how to go about acting courageously, just without using the word.
> t also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident. I've noticed in many fields that the most successful people are slightly overconfident. On the face of it this seems implausible. Surely it would be optimal to have exactly the right estimate of one's abilities. How could it be an advantage to be mistaken? Because this error compensates for other sources of error in the opposite direction: being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own.
I disagree. Being overconfident compensates for the amount of luck you need to succeed. If 100 people are overconfident, and 5 of them succeed, it paid off for these 5 to be overconfident - because when you have that kind of luck, overconfidence is the appropriate level of confidence.
100 of 100 people are never overconfident (by definition). Overconfidence is infectious (because not everyone can vet every claim). Overconfident people are inherently predisposed to selection bias by others.
Humans naturally think linearly. This is because our lizard brains have evolved over millions of years in environment where linear processes were the most important to understand for survival. When we see a lion that is 1 mile away we know that we have 2x the time to run away than when the lion is .5 miles away.
So when we see a crappy project that took a few months to create, we naturally assume that it will be slightly less crappy in a few more months. We can't even imagine what it would look like if it was 100x more useful in 9 months. Even PG and other great early investors only have a slight notion of what that would look like.
I have to disagree - I feel like most successful investors explicitly look for ideas that can grow in the exponential fashion you describe. YC particularly doesn't seem to show any interest towards linearly-scalable businesses AFAIK.
EDIT: Or, rather, I agree with the point you're making, but I think it's pretty commonly-held belief.
There is creating new work and there is judging early work. One hack I’ve used for both is to realize that your brain is different at different times of day and in different levels of exhaustion/sleep/context etc. You are almost a different person as time passes. That novelty gives you new perspectives and new ideas with time. So always document new ideas (i have even built a new tool to make that as fast as possible) and then live with them for a bit. A good one will haunt you in that it will keep showing itself and resurfacing in other contexts. If the regret of not having it is heavier than the effort to put it together just use a weekend to put it together.
For judging ideas, you should pay even more attention to regrets. Your choice is a psychological anchor, so if you chose poorly you may not know it as your brain will automatically try to justify your choices, but if you find yourself angry at past rejections you’ve made on an idea, that’s probably regret talking to you, and that means you’ve been subconsciously haunted by something you should be paying more attention to.
Now I’ve learned to note what upsets me about an idea and at times dig in deeper and consider it extra points towards the idea.
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." -- Linus Torvalds on comp.os.minix in 1991
A couple of decades ago, I set forth to create something every day. It could be as simple as a bit of prose, writing some code, or as involved as a birdhouse. I haven't succeeded in creating every day since, but I did successfully create a habit of behavior that I cannot break. I've built games, websites, apps, written blogs, filed patents, built siege engines, been published, painted, carved wooden toys, remodeled houses, and much more. I've also started a couple of companies, one of which went through YCS17 and is still growing.
It's sad that there exists any cynicism around creation at all. Our ability to create might be the most human of our qualities. We literally make the world we live in.
The creations that excite me most are those that enable people to create even more. I really appreciate what PG is saying here, what he believes, and the dream factory that is YC.
I wonder if a good hack would be to think in terms of how I would react if a (my) child showed me something they made? Children are often doing something for the first time. I've noticed this breaks down my barriers to what I consider impressive.
Founders are in a similar situation, but since they're almost universally adults, we tend to apply adult prejudices to their work.
So much of the advice I see from YC (PG in this case, I know he isn't YC, but it's all cut from the same cloth) is about how to change your outer circumstances to accommodate inner impediments, such as Fear. They'll offer hacks or "mind games" to trick yourself into moving past the fear, as PG talks about here:
"But it's a bit strange that you have to play mind games with yourself to avoid being discouraged by lame-looking early efforts."
Unfortunately, I don't see anyone over there talking about conquering fear permanently, such that these issues fall away and what is left is boundless creativity.
One tool offered here is to "switch polarity", which means to take the other side of the argument. Fine, but real wisdom comes from transcending polarity.
Another tool offered is to tap into the motivation of curiosity. That's great as "early work" on the inner game, but there are much more robust ways to conquer fear when one looks at cutting edge work on consciousness evolution, such as Integral Dynamics, or studies Eastern traditions like Vajrayana or Zen.
I look forward to the day where YC elevates this discussion toward awakening themselves and their network to more transcendental tools.
You don't want to conquer fear entirely. Fear is an important signal. Physical fear keeps you out of danger; ego fear keeps you from wasting lots of time on fruitless things or doing things not in accord with your values.
You want to control fear. Put it in a little box so that it's a signal and not a dictator. Process it so that you're aware of what precisely is making you afraid and can rationally think of ways to mitigate that concern. Fear is a reason to be vigilant and aware, not a reason to freeze up and stop doing what you're doing.
Not the poster who you are replying to, but from the references he gave, I assume he was more or less saying the same as you.
In meditation what you want is to become aware of your feelings/emotions/sensations to a level where you can then very consciously choose what to do when something happens, instead of triggering a knee-jerk reaction.
I've found one way to conquer fear and develop perseverance is to just (gradually) go thru enough hard things and learn to be okay w/ discomfort.
I've never been as active as I wanted in my young years due to weak health, and recently started engaging in outdoor activities I always wanted to do (long-distance hiking, climbing, scuba diving), mostly because I don't enjoy hitting the gym and looking at a wall, but I didn't anticipate the benefit it would have in my psyche.
Now, when faced w/ hardships of life or random sources of stressors, I can relate back to some past experience and think "hey, I did that crazy thing, of course I can handle this other thing here". I don't know if this psychological phenomena has a name, I would only describe as "developing thick skin". I think it also happens naturally to individuals who had a hard upbringing and are hard working nonetheless. Maybe there's some idea to explore here.
Yes, this! I start my days by jumping into an unheated swimming pool (or stepping into an ice-cold shower, when the pool's covered for the coldest months), and one of the main reasons / benefits is the self-mastery involved. "No, I don't want to do this. Yes, I can do it anyway, and start my day with a small victory."
I've been (mostly) quietly working on this for several years, after my initially-promising YC (W09) startup failed to take off, having been afflicted by what I realised on deep reflection was mostly fear, egotism and self-sabotage.
Like you I think the concept has huge potential, and I've found some modalities that you haven't mentioned but that I've found particularly powerful, and could be more broadly beneficial for founders and creators generally.
Feel free to hit me up (email in profile, or in Bookface) if you want to connect and discuss further. (Offer is open to anyone else interested too.)
You are right, there is huge potential in broader knowledge and practice of "consciousness practice".
Wim Hof has been making the rounds on HN lately. His latest book just came out, and I would recommend anyone who is looking for a super straightforward and practical way of systematically facing and overcoming fear, to check out either the book or just download the Wim Hof method app to do the breathing and the cold showers. You really don't need to "believe" anything, just need to try out the basic exercises and see what you feel, then decide if it's something that you want to keep doing or not.
This is exactly the type of thing we can explore that pays dividends in ways that has a halo effect over everything in our life, not just our startup performance. Thanks for mentioning!
> One tool offered here is to "switch polarity", which means to take the other side of the argument. Fine, but real wisdom comes from transcending polarity.
I suggest real transcendence of polarity comes from holding both sides of the argument in your mind at the same time until they merge, and spending some time really understanding the other side than the one you're attracted to is a route there.
> Unfortunately, I don't see anyone over there talking about conquering fear permanently, such that these issues fall away and what is left is boundless creativity.
Constant reinforcement made by little, constant and almost predictable successes. Read the psychological literature on self confidence (but skip bloggers and influencers)
One reason why I believe TikTok took off so fast is that they made it ok for videos to not be very good. They're not supposed to be overly polished and perfect. On Instagram, what you post is a reflection of you and how you want the world to see and judge you. TikTok is the opposite: videos are ephemeral, fun little things that you don't have to take seriously.
I think embarrassment really comes from writing code that you thought was great and then you look back at it and read it and it's too confident for it's own good. Learning is a gradual process–I'm almost never embarrassed by the code I wrote in the past, but that's not because that code is perfect; it's just that I made the best choices I could at the time, and made sure to know enough to identify what I didn't know back then. Embarrassment stems out of not knowing what you don't know and acting on that.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
I got put onto this quote/video by @garry here on HN, when he included it in his most recent YouTube video where he discusses how he made his channel grow & be successful. It's definitely something I've struggled with for a long time, and I wish I had found it sooner.
It's missing the bit where he explains that doing good work is in many fields (in precisely the ones that people are attracted to) is not enough to sustain yourself. You need to be super good or be lucky, have connections or some other form advantage.
"To start a painting saying that it's just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it's just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it to something more"
Another reason to have lower standards initially is so you can properly measure the intensity of a problem. The harder your product is to use, the better the gauge for how much people truly want it.
Either
a) people use your product despite its shoddiness or
b) people complain about what more they want
And if people don't do either, well then it was just a "quick hack" to keep iterating from.
Scholars of literature sometimes speak of "juvenilia", the work a writer does when beginning. This can be quite readable--Jane Austen's are very funny--but not up to the standard of the mature work.
The reason many hope you'll succeed is that they hope to rise with you. With investors this incentive is particularly explicit. They want you to succeed because they hope you'll make them rich in the process.
I'm more cynical. Investors benefit from the illusion of success, whether it is real or not. They can invest in something they don't think will succeed if PR and marketing can increase the valuation.
This is true, but they would all prefer the real version to the illusion, and as an entrepreneur, you know if it's all smoke and mirrors or not, so it doesn't really matter if the investor believes in you or not, as long as they earnestly support you.
Why do certain days seem better suited to doing good work?
Most days, I feel like doing nothing. But some days, the computer calls to me, and it would be foolish to ignore it. If I’ve done anything impressive, it’s during those days.
But why? And can those days be maximized? Is it strictly a product of one’s environment? It can’t be; the institute for advanced study showed that you can have a perfect environment but make no progress.
If those days go into all-nighters, you might have bipolar disorder. I went undiagnosed for years, and didn't believe it myself until I charted the moods with the help of roommates and a doctor. I began to notice being happy at inappropriate times (funerals), and sad at others (weddings). My moods would mysteriously cycle and I really had to take advantage of the upswings.
I went undiagnosed for such a long time because managers would often point at me as an example of startup dedication, and then when I crashed and they got disappointed I would jump to a new startup.
Now I stick to a schedule and never deviate from it. When I do, the monster returns.
I don't have an answer for you, but I have a very similar experience. some days I wake up and it's "go time", sifting through source files and crushing multiple bugs in eight hours, often forgetting to eat lunch! other days I'll try over and over to start working, but every time I look at a line of code, I feel an immense pressure to alt-tab to the browser or get out of my chair and pace around my apartment. if nothing else, it's good to know other people are like this.
I've tried to examine correlations between my focus at work and my sleep schedule, diet, social life, etc. and I don't really see anything. sometimes my best weeks of work will coincide with eating bad takeout and staying up til 2am playing factorio every night. sometimes I go to bed at 10pm, eat three healthy meals a day, and accomplish absolutely nothing at work.
Seems like a strange comment for the article but since you made it,
For me its not that I don't feel like doing work on most days. Instead I have periods where I am super uber productive and days where I feel completely exhausted. I can't tell if its a mental thing or rather there's actually something physically wrong Lol. My mind tends to be blurry like its rebelling and if I force myself to work hard I start feeling feverish. I have trouble figuring out if I'm not working hard enough or working too hard.
I wonder if its also like that for some of the successful startup founders out there too
I really connected with how you said you are feeling because it is how I have been feeling. I work for a small innovation group (not a startup), so my work environment is flexible. I am also trying to bootstrap a startup project in my free time.
I will have days that I am super productive and can get through a ton of work, but then I have other days that I just can't bring myself to work. It feels weird cause when I force myself to work I get way less done, so I then feel like it is pointless cause I get such little done compared to when I am in the mood for the work. I don't really know how I should feel about it cause I feel guilty on the days that I don't get as much done, but it feels like a waste of time and is draining to just sit there and force out a small amount of work.
I don't know whether this is true, and I'm writing this out of curiosity and not bad faith, but the most parsimonious explanation for this being the top comment is that both the writer and voters assumed (as I did before reading) that the essay was about time-of-day work rather than time-of-project-lifespan work.
But it's a good point! Faith fluctuates by day, and those low-faith days are when a small project is abandoned. I think graham's solutions (supportive friends, ambitious city, historical examples) are a good way to hold the faith when the general public and the project itself don't seem to warrant it.
For me after significant journaling and recording, it seems to be when nutrition, sleep and stress are all correctly managed. I can even have several days in a row that are optimal for deep work if I'm careful, but life likes to throw in a wrench from time to time of course.
The big things for me have been to eat a very nutritionally heavy breakfast (I hate eating breakfast, it still takes me forever) and to calorie count both to make sure I'm getting enough and to make sure I'm getting a decent balance of carbs/protein/fat. For sleep, going to sleep early and having wind down time so I sleep well (tea and a book are a winning combo for me there usually).
Stress is of course the difficult one we have the least control over. Exercise is a huge help but that can also change up the nutrition equation. Even then, it's still easy for bad stress days to also muck up the sleep side of the equation and it can take days to get that sorted out.
That differs from person to person and you'll have to find out for yourself.
I enjoy the late afternoon hours when most of my colleagues are already gone, the phone rings not as often and I can put some music on headphones. Takes me about 15 minutes till I get into the flow state and am highly productive.
Likewise and I have to add that mornings I am usually not very productive anyway, regardless of the environment. I've been working from home for the past few Covid months and the bulk of my work is done in the afternoon. That's not very convenient for me as I'd like to enjoy my time off after 5, but I usually end up past that to take advantage of the momentum built.
> "The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could."
OK nothing happens without optimism and work and cynically excluding everything will leave you with nowhere to go, but the solution to that can't be optimistically including everything. If you want to lose lots of money, look at the penny stock market and think of all the ways those companies could become massive instead of looking for reasons they won't. Think of all the reasons alterntive cancer treatments could work, all the reasons UFOs could exist, all the reasons giving money to the local mega-church could be a good idea.
It's way to easy for most of us to convince ourselves of the happy path of a bunch of nonsense, and it's cynicism which keeps us away from the worst excesses of woo and hype and being conned or abused.
It's easy to think of reasons online grocery delivery "could work" during COVID19 in 2020, but if you were doing that in 1999 and investing in Webvan you'd have lost everything. Webvan "could work" and you could have thought of many reasons why, and you would have lost all your money. The people thinking why it couldn't work saved their bacon. Boo.com online fashion in 1999, the people thinking why it couldn't work saved their money and time and effort, even though online clothes shopping totally could work and does today.
Or that thinking of reasons why you could learn painting is irrelevant if you don't want to spend your time painting. You may as well rule it out first instead of challenging yourself all the ways you could become good at it and fit it into your life.
The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could.
An easier way than seeing them as a challenge is to method act the ideas. The source of new ideas is often a new, lived experience. I think of how AirBnB was in the beginning: links from CraigsList to a website where host and guest could message. Payment was in person and in cash! The lived experience of being your own BnB rather than going through all the bureaucratic and government hoops was there, it just needed to be coded.
> One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame.
I see this more concisely written as:
One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work __is the fear is fear itself__
Anyone have some examples? I have some.
* For example, not taking a job upon offer, for fear of failing.
* I witness some mananger's/companies inducing fear, rather than embrace failure as one of the options. Without enabling high risk, high reward, people settle for safer low risk and mediocre results.
I think some of the best works also results from beginners. They add the new perspective needed & creative flair as new source of input.
Are you this good going from abstract to practical? I know I am not. For me the it's a revelation that _fear itself_ actually is _fear of making something lame_. So, I don't really see the value of expressing this "concisely" because if will never arrive from A to B, if A is abstract pattern. Though once you have shown me that A is equivalent to B (the practical), I do agree, A is equivalent to B. But, unless you show me B upfront, just concisely stating A to me is of no value: I can not make the connection from Abstract to Practical. Only from practical (something lame) to maybe abstract (fear itself).
This is also why I don't really buy in to the whole "conciseness" thing - I prefer things spelled out. I suspect many others do too.
Sure, lameness could be one. But I think it is rooted in fear of something else.
Fear of failure.
Fear of judgement.
Fear of mistakes.
...
I would argue lameness (as those listed here above) are still abstract. Are you saying you cannot move towards defining and understanding what is causing the fear when you create something lame?
I don't disagree with the point on overconfidence but it is a bit exhausting to be surrounded by 10,000+ overconfident CEOs of 3 person companies in Silicon Valley, most of whom will never succeed. It contributes to a culture that can be toxic and alienating for other personality types. Maybe that is the price we pay for innovation.
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Of course, there's no telling how much extra baggage you've stored in the word "overconfidence" here, but without overconfident risk takers, there aren't many people left to do the job.
Perhaps we don't need as many overconfident risk takers, and I think of this whenever I read about the quiet millionaire or people who have a flourishing business that is not sexy.
I think that's more the product of VC culture; as a founder you're in a constant case of "selling your company" which in most cases is also selling yourself to people, i.e. investing in a startup is tantamount to investing in the person in the early stages. I haven't seen this mentality nearly as much in folks that are bootstrapping without the "extreme growth" required by VCs.
And, although PG is in the Silicon Valley bubble (where only cool things happen, and it's the hub of cool in tech, duh), the advice he has is fairly general. In the board game creator community there's a lot of advice on making things that fail and making things that don't sell "for the fun of making the thing," because let's face it... most of your shit doesn't sell and never has any market value, but that doesn't make it any less useful or instructive.
TL;DR: Being okay with "failure" is a major part of any profession or hobby, and isn't intrinsic to Silicon Valley or VC backed startups...
I have the same reaction. Also, there's definitely a local optimum for being surrounded by people who are all trying to hock their crazy "world-changing" dreams at the same time.
A population of 10% crazy dreamers is inspiring. A population of 90% crazy dreamers is maybe inspiring in limited doses. Being surrounded by that kind of person, every day, all the time, is tedious and uninspiring. I can see how it's great for investors (who only really care about that 1 success in 100), but for the other 99 people involved, it's enough to make you very cynical.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being confident and contrarian, as look as you have some type of validation, or driving force, grounded in a reality. Often founders, especially those with less founding experience, over-value confidence "hustle" and under-appreciate experience and advice; I don't have much empathy when dealing with that particular cohort.
I think there is a kind of blind spot, if not contradiction, in the essay. It could be a good kind of paradox like the immovable object vs irresistible force thing.. it’s the paradox of lisp, of bel, of Julia, of mit style hacking.. they MIGHT aspire to be good jokes but as far as I can see they are at best, some kind of inside joke.. it’s a special kind of lame.. maybe we shouldn’t ask whether jokes can be ambitious but whether ambitions can be truly hysterically funny
The two paragraphs in the middle about how it gets harder as you get older is exactly the problem I'm having right now. Your standards rise, which is generally good, and you have fewer long blocks of time. Both of these problems are from success both professionally and personally e.g. good career and happy family.
The only trick I've found that helps with this 'problem' is only do one new thing at a time.
> One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame.
Any evidence to back up this claim? Maybe it's true for SV where there are a lot of angel investors. For me, the biggest blocker for starting a "lame" idea is money. Ideally, Fuck-You Money + capital to prove the business model.
An example of lame idea: A new footwear company. The main goal would be to optimize for minimal waste. Shoes designed to last 10x the time. The would cost more to purchase, but the cost per month would be the same - so something like a subscription model would need to be in place.
Because the initial price would be steep. Let's say you spend $70 dollars on shoes and they last 2 years, so that's $350 for 10 years. It would be hard to design a single pair of shoes, especially at the beginning, at lasts 10 years. The goal would be to replace that pair after 5 years.
No one would pay $350 for a pair of shoes from an unknown company, but if I'd offer them for $3/month it's a different story.
I mean you can already buy really nice expensive leather shoes that will last a long time. To last even longer you buy two pairs and alternate them. You can also then get the sole redone if the upper remains in good shape.
> One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame.
No, the biggest thing holding people back from doing great work is resources. Everything else is a distant concern.
Remember what Y Combinator does? It connects people with resources, to people who claim they'll do great work.
Good, boring, mundane redistribution of resources from old rich people to young capable people. Good, do more of that and please spare us your 'wisdom' - it leads to bullshit artists whose sole skill is 'appreciating' your 'wisdom' to insert themselves into the process and ruin the whole thing.
YC adds resources to people who are already making something. It may not be what they'll end up with (Segment, recently acquired, started with an entirely different idea) but they've started.
In the passage you quoted, PG is talking about an earlier stage than that. ("They're too frightened even to start.")
I think you almost hit the nail on the head.. it’s like a paraphrase of that saying about genius vs talent.. the difference between good work and great work is.. good work takes resources, but properly great work surprises us with how little it takes..
Has paulgraham.com never had TLS or is it just more obvious now because of Chrome UI changes? I find the old-school style & minimalism helps focus on the content, but shouldn't he at least have a LetsEncrypt cert up there or something? Or is the argument that because the site has no interactivity, it's not a big deal?
It has a TLS certificate for the Yahoo Store domain if you browse to the https:// version, but I agree that PG should add something easy like Let's Encrypt or put it behind Cloudflare. It's been "modernized" with a mobile version already, so I think that HTTPS is a good next step. It can't hurt, at least.
It's actually using yahoo store builder. pg has no control over it, because yahoo owns it. He mentioned that to me when I reported that the mobile interface broke various parts of his site.
He made this site in the early 2000s using the store builder he coded in the 90s. His framework probably doesn't even have support for SSL (because it was written in the 90s).
The best innovators are really good at taking Version 1.0 and figuring out what rework will turn it into a better 2.0, and then 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, etc. This is an identifiable skill! It can be cultivated. Once you've got it, the failings of Version 1.0 do not ruin your self-esteem. You just get to work on fixing them. And not enough people think about this systematically.
One of my favorite museum stops of all time was the British Library, where a glass case held Paul McCartney's first draft of "Yesterday." You could see, cross-out by cross-out, how a somewhat awkward ballad got turned into a pop classic.
I'll submit that almost everything that looks like genius from a distance is a lot of step-by-step craft when viewed more closely. I did some consulting at Facebook in 2008 and it was quite amazing seeing how rapidly and incessantly Team Zuckerberg was not just adding features, but also rejiggering the way the feed worked; the layout, the everything.
Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into.