Other than this article being from 1982 I didn't find alot interesting in it. There are only a couple of quotes from Michael Bloomberg and the article isn't really about him at all. I guess you could say that I learned that click bait headlines were a thing back in 1982:)
In all seriousness.......
I think the most interesting thing about Michael Bloomberg's success( 13th richest person in the world) is that successful people don't typically come from nowhere, but usually have a very strong track record of successes that predate the event or thing that others associate their success with.
In his case he was:
- an engineer from a good school,
- then got an MBA from Harvard.
- He was then a general partner at Salomon Brothers(the Google of wall street at the time).
He then left with a $10 million buyout in 1981 dollars that he used to fund Bloomberg.
Or put another way, I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be. There will always be outliers who finds a reason to turn his/her life around but almost all the successful people I know had an impressive track record of accomplishments before their big success happened.
TL/DR success is rarely an overnight event. Most successful people build on an increasing track record of successful events before hitting their big success.
> Or put another way, I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be.
This is definitely wrong. Take almost any CEO and at 25 their careers are pretty close to pretty much every middle manager at any other big corp. There are of course outliers, but start with Tim Cook and just go down the list.
By 35 most people have their trajectory starting to lock, but there are also many 35 year olds who's destiny is far from certain.
This whole post is basically ridiculous, and the reason is because there isn't any science in it:
There's no attempt to balance it with a control group of people who are always successful but never attract any real notoriety, or people who are rarely successful but have a giant hit that catapults them forward, and there's no methodology for defining what these antecedent success markers actually are.
This part however illustrates the biggest problem:
> Most successful people build on an increasing track record of successful events before hitting their big success.
Most people don't have "track records" until they are notable, at which point they have the ability to retrospectively define themselves however they please, since they most likely haven't been under journalistic surveillance the entire time.
The most successful software entrepreneur I know (in monetary terms) had none of this. When I met him he was fresh out of the army and not as an officer. He did some web programming for us. The next thing he did was the classic bad idea of consulting his way to a product. A decade later he's worth north of 100 million dollars
I think it's "lede" but anyway I just didn't want to be too specific in case anyone felt like tracking him down. After the company we both worked for he went back home and was going to do some software projects on a consulting basis. He started working on administrative software for a guy who had a business at the periphery of the medical field. The guy who had the business suggested that the software he needed might be useful to other people in the business and got my friend to do the project for less money in exchange for the right to sell it as a product. That original customer also invested. I think one of the keys was that it wasn't a glamorous business and no one terribly sophisticated was working on software for it. From there I think it was old fashioned business, years of slogging and sales and incremental growth until his was the top provider in his region. Then he sold a large part of the company to a private equity firm. So it was a very not silicon valley story.
As far as key lessons for people on this site I'd say it's not to focus on the standard silicon valley story. In a lot of ways he did everything that goes against the summmary wisdom of ycombinator hacker news. He didn't solve a problem that he had. He started solo. He consulted to product. He technically had a angel investor in his first customer. He never raised VC. He sold to private equity. He didn't do it in Silicon Valley. Also his tech skills weren't that impressive and his platform choice seemed laughable. I think the key is solving a real problem in an unglamorous little known business and sell and survive and grow.
I think if you consult and happen upon a need that can be solved by a product you could be successful. In that case maybe 1 in 10 or 1 in a 100 would happen upon such an idea and execute. If you plan to do this then you are planning to be one of those 1 in 10 or 1 in a 100 which means under the most generous assumption you have less than a 1 in 10 chance of success.
Indeed I believe Richard Hamming addressed this in his talk "You and Your Research."
In it he says, "The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest."
I think the part about opportunity is probably the most applicable outside of research. If you go to a good school or have done a good job at work, then you're more likely to get promoted or given more responsibilities. And with more responsibility, you can show again that you can do a good job and thus get further responsibilities.
In any society that has a strong bias towards inequality by inheritance, most people are already by the age of .. 15 who they will be (take smaller numbers to make it even more ridiculously obvious).
That isn't very applicable to this example. The majority of the super rich in the US do not inherit their wealth and never have. The majority come from the middle or lower class.
The US has a bias of inequality through wealth creation, with one of the highest median incomes to go with it.
Honestly, this argument appears to be a complete tautology (successful people are successful).
Also, what is with the fatalism?
>Or put another way, I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be.
>There will always be outliers who finds a reason to turn his/her life around but almost all the successful people I know had an impressive track record of accomplishments before their big success happened.
You likely know a tiny fraction of 'successful people'.
If you want a real laugh Google highschool or college highlight reels of current NBA or NFL standouts. You usually end up with clips of monstrous kids single handedly wiping the floor with hopelessly outmatched opponents.
With professional sports or the olympics it's basically a hard requirement. Does anyone get into the NBA who didn't spend thousands of hours practicing basketball as a kid?
Whereas you could write a successful book at any age and on your first try (although unlikely).
"Does anyone get into the NBA who didn't spend thousands of hours practicing basketball as a kid?"
Sure, if you're unusually tall or athletic. The Warriors' Festus Ezeli never played organized basketball of any kind until college. Manute Bol didn't start until his mid-teens.
Ok. Let's narrow it down. Does anyone make it to the NBA at a position that requires something other than being able to run up and down the floor at a decent speed and be around 7 feet tall that didnt do so? A non-center position? Certainly no guard, small forward, or power forward I know of. And even those people you mentioned were/are non-exceptional backups or non-starters.
Though any good university may have filled the same role for an exceptionally bright an enterprising person with a modest background, Bloomberg is know to specifically credit Johns Hopkins as almost a beginning of his life completely different from what he had known before. This NYT article goes into more depth about its transformative role, his later significant donations, and how he valued rigorous social science research when mayor.
"Track record" is just a byproduct of motivated/smart people trying hard at life. Also there's no such thing as "increasing track record of successful events". You probably perceive it as such because you only learn what the media/people want you to hear. A lot of successful people kept going and going even when there was no glimmer of hope just because they believed in what they were doing, and one day they had an "overnight success". In extreme cases they never even saw their own success in their lifetime (not that I am a fan of this phenomenon).
i think your friends, network and environment dictates the kind of success you have. the things you mentioned, going to good schools, getting into a career with plenty of successful people around you, begets that kind of success.
but i also know a handful of folks with success that did not go to good schools or have great careers but achieved significant business success: an oil rig machine parts manufacturer, a fabric mill owner, a latex manufacturer, a luxury furniture reseller, that have achieved success because their friends and networks are the kind of guys who will keep having goes at different businesses and products until something sticks. most of these businesses aren't cutting edge technology but there is a lot of value in unifying supply chains that are still very dependent on trust and know-whos, as well as having a bit of edge in the business negotiation process. their success had little to do with which schools they went to, only that they surrounded themselves with other people who made business their focus.
who would have guessed that in 2 decades he would be so successful. Bloomberg was right in the middle of the intersection of computers and trading. The timing could not have been better.
The whole point of the article is that more businesses start during recessions. The logical flow from this article is that because The Great Recession was what it was, we have this huge cycle of businesses starting up.
In all seriousness.......
I think the most interesting thing about Michael Bloomberg's success( 13th richest person in the world) is that successful people don't typically come from nowhere, but usually have a very strong track record of successes that predate the event or thing that others associate their success with.
In his case he was:
- an engineer from a good school,
- then got an MBA from Harvard.
- He was then a general partner at Salomon Brothers(the Google of wall street at the time).
He then left with a $10 million buyout in 1981 dollars that he used to fund Bloomberg.
Or put another way, I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be. There will always be outliers who finds a reason to turn his/her life around but almost all the successful people I know had an impressive track record of accomplishments before their big success happened.
TL/DR success is rarely an overnight event. Most successful people build on an increasing track record of successful events before hitting their big success.