My immediate concern is your definitions of success, growth, and self-sacrifice. You have narrowed your discussion to a person working a startup, but you have chosen too broad of language.
Instead of growth, I think you should have use the idea of investment. One chooses how you to spend his time, and that may be in learning new tools, creating a product, or non-work related things.
Self-sacrifice is the key to producing strong personal relationships, and not something that should be rejected based on a faulty association with time spent in business. Whether one works for himself or another, it is not self-sacrifice; rather, it is toward the reward. Self-sacrifice for personal reward is no longer self-sacrifice.
Success in business or wealth (which seems to be your focus) may be completely unrelated to other people's definitions of success. One may choose not to invest his time toward monetary success because he defines success not by becoming rich but by enjoying strong relationships with his family. Note that I am not saying that one cannot be "successful" at both, but there are many who have become wealthy to the detriment of everything I would consider success. To me they are wealthy or well-known, but truly failures.
Acting for the benefit of others does not have to be to one's own detriment, and relationships without self-sacrifice are ultimately doomed.
A good friend of mine is the very opposite of a successful person, by almost every definition - she has been poor almost all her life (way below our country's poverty level), obese, chronically overworked, always stressed out, and often depressed. You'd expect that she is of the so-called lower class, but no - she's VERY intelligent and only hasn't finished her master thesis yet because she "has so much other stuff to do".
Swombat casually mentioned that success might be a lifelong habit - in her case it seems that UNsuccess can also be a habit. Whenever a decision comes along, she decides for what's good for others. I recently heard she might even put off her baby plans for one year just because her pupils asked her to stay with them until school leaving exam. She also hates money, and starts inviting people for dinner (who earn a lot more than her) whenever she got some € to spare.
Every week she's having a fever because she sleeps only 2-3 hours a day so she can spend more time with working for her students (from whom she can't take much money, because they are, well, students).
I really like her - almost everybody does. Such sacrificing personalities are well thought-of in our society. Many people admire her for her ability to work 15h a day, while earning almost nothing. But it's a life I would never want to lead.
Recently, her life has finally improved, and she has been forced to earn more so her husband is allowed to move to Austria. Still, she now has 3-4 jobs at a time, hustling around so she earns < half of what I make by working 20-30h per week.
I relate to her, and I'm gradually getting over it - but my mindset since I was a child was the only currency that I had an endless supply of was suffering. If I didn't have the money to do something for someone, or to do good in the world, I could spend convenience, time to sleep, comfort, health, or opportunities. I still feel that way, because it's true, but I also feel like I am worth as much as anyone else, and that good done for the selfish is usually at best neutral but probably bad, so that moderates my self-sacrifice. It allows me to narrow my focus to people and ideas that are net goods, and not to hurt myself to help people into a better situation than I am currently in.
A nice effect is that I end up maintaining the resources to help people who are worth helping without getting to the point where I'm spending suffering. It's really an accounting problem. If I suffer to death helping selfish people, think about all of the good people that I'm going to miss out on helping. I may end up sacrificing myself and still having a bad net effect in the world.
She probably isn't enjoying life at all. I've known people like this and they are usually very unhappy with their situation, but feel powerless to change their habits. Or, more likely, they gain satisfaction from the attention due to all the "self-sacrifice".
My relative is just like the person described here. Goes out of her way to please everyone, sacrifices greatly, terrible financials. All because she loves the attention that is bestowed upon her. However, she is utterly miserable with her life in general and is constantly bitter about her circumstances...which she eases away by going out to dinner with some friends or buying an expensive gadget.
Yes, people like that don't see how they are the master of their own life. It's a difficult way to go, and I'm glad I don't have to learn this the hard way.
They are aware that it's difficult. They're also aware that they continue to choose that lifestyle. This is just as valid of a life choice as any other.
It's more than a little arrogant to say that she's not the master of her own life just because she works to the detriment of her health. Yes, by defintion, she needs money to survive; nonetheless, she goes out and gets that money when it's needed. That is worthy of respect.
You're saying she's somehow a bad human. In reality it's the greed for money which makes us bad humans.
I know these types of people (I used to be one to a lesser degree) and I don't think it's fair to say that she knows what she's doing. As a highly intelligent person, if this is pointed out to her she'll no doubt rationalise it all somehow, but that doesn't mean it's a conscious choice.
I've lived with an anti-money mindset for most of my life (it's changing, slowly), and it wasn't a conscious choice. I never sat down and thought "ok, I don't want money, so I'm going to steer away from opportunities to make money, spend money that arrives to me as quickly as possible, and basically generally push it away". Once it was pointed out to me repeatedly that I did this, I started working on changing this subconscious choice. It's still an ongoing process, and far from over.
It takes some pretty strong-headed, tireless friends to keep pointing out to you that you're being stupid and it's hurting your life. It takes a number of obvious, unignorable examples of people less talented than you doing much better.
Without those constant nudges over a period of years, most people will rationalise things just as you do, about themselves or about others. I wish on this woman that her friends will figure out how to get it through to her that she could have a much better life, and that her own subconscious choices and thought patterns are holding her back, rather than any external circumstances.
For example, one such belief is the idea that money is evil, the cause of problems. That's a load of crap. Money is a token of value that can be exchanged for whatever the hell you want. It's a resource that can be used to do great good or great evil - but that entirely depends on the person doing things. Money is a lever that you can use to multiply your impact on the world - but as long as you keep pushing money away from you, you don't get to use that lever effectively. If you understand this idea, that goes a long way towards starting to resolve manmal's friend's money issues...
I said greed for money makes us bad humans. Not money.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with "not wanting to impact the world", and it's a shame that so many are implying that it is. It's "enjoying life", plain and simple.
I don't care about money; I let it run out a few months ago. Didn't phase me. I simply got a job when I needed to, and now I have $11k saved up. I'm very lucky to be a programmer. But more than that, I'm lucky to be able to enjoy life by studying as much science as I want to. Does that make me a bad person? By your implication, it does, because I don't care about money, and spend it freely.
On a different note... It sounds like you've been through a struggle, and came out stronger. I just wanted to say congratulations. I respect that a lot.
Of course it doesn't make you a bad person - and it sounds like your choice is somewhat more deliberate. That said, I'd point out that it looks like you're plenty capable of making a lot more money whenever you want to, and if you set your mind on buying a house you'd come up with the cash for it within a couple of years.
That's a world away from the situation described in previous posts. It sounds like you have your priorities straight, which is commendable, rather than being at the mercy of a self-sacrificing mindset...
On a different note... It sounds like you've been through a struggle, and came out stronger. I just wanted to say congratulations. I respect that a lot.
I would never call her a bad human, and I mentioned that I like her - she's a good friend, and she won't do harm to anyone (except herself). She's just no good human to herself.
She is clearly not the master of her life if she decides to put off pregnancy so some pupils don't feel disappointed. She wants at least 3 children (very badly!) and she's already over 30 years old - so, she has to hurry up anyway. At least that's not mastery according to my definition.
Yes, that's the strange thing about her situation. She's a very conscious person, and chooses to hate money and hurting other people's expectations - even if she harms herself by that.
Instead of making choices that benefit others, make choices that benefit yourself.
I have a problem with this statement. I think of all the people that have put in hard, boring work so that you can write that blog on an open-source powered internet, so that I can type this response on my unix powered mac, so that we can go to Wikipedia and gain knowledge only the exceedingly wealthy could have had 200 years ago.
Other than that, I'm really at a loss for words.
EDIT: seriously, am I missing something? Even when that one guy was trying to talk about how some child prodigy who had died wasn't very smart, and pg talked about how embarassed he was for hackernes, I don't know if I've ever seen something I disagree with so profoundly. Did the author only mean 'make those choices some of the time'? It seems to me that the natural conclusion to that statement is pretty disgusting.
Did the author only mean 'make those choices some of the time'
"This isn't to say that we should all become selfish beasts concerned only with ourselves. We are lucky to live in a world where most of the really great opportunities involve delivering growth for many people at the same time. I'm not suggesting that we should focus only on personal growth - just that every decision should be optimised so that personal growth is part of the deal, and self-sacrifice is not."
> We are lucky to live in a world where most of the really great opportunities involve delivering growth for many people at the same time. I'm not suggesting that we should focus only on personal growth - just that every decision should be optimised so that personal growth is part of the deal, and self-sacrifice is not.
It seems he's trying to find some middle ground between two outlooks that are taken for granted as being two polar opposites: the Randian selfish pursuit versus the altruistic self-sacrificial.
Balance is good, so can I appreciate that. It becomes apparent that its a false dichotomy if you try and label an open-source project as belonging to one category or the other (Rails and Linux as two examples in the sibling comment).
I think what he meant was something more along the lines of: Don't let self-sacrifice inhibit your ability to accomplish the things you want to.
Helping others is pretty much a necessity on the road to personal growth. To build tools that only you use stunts your ability and your ability to impact the world. Right now I'm on personal projects building things for other people to use, even though I myself have no need of the tools I'm building. In the process however, I'm learning things building those tools, like socket programming and interface design.
I have no problem with that. But the idea that I should reject doing things that benefit a large number of people just because they don't simultaneously benefit me in an optimal way is scary. If you're optimizing for your own personal growth, then you're only going to choose to do something that benefits others when it benefits you more than anything else you might choose to do with your limited time and resources.
Now look, I know, maybe I'm just being selfish and optimizing for my personal happiness when I donate to a cause I believe in, maybe Bill Gates just does philanthropy because he 'made crappy products' and needs to feel good about himself. But I don't believe that those choices are optimal for personal growth, and I believe that the world turns on them.
I'm reminded of Paul Buchheit's post from yesterday "Be good to yourself, and to others. It's actually not possible to do one or the other - you must do both, or neither."
But do you think a Wikipedia contributor thinks, "damn, it's Wikipedia-editing day and I'd really rather be out with my friends...nevermind, better crack on" or that they enjoy the research and editing in itself? Wikipedia is successful in my opinion because it makes contributing enjoyable (and self-benefiting)...it's a framework for swombat's advice.
I think of all the people that have put in hard, boring work...
Those people didn't do their work because they figured it'd be neat if you could share your thoughts on the weather, kittens and startups with the world for free. They did it because it served a goal for them at the time - they were selfish.
DHH did Rails because he wanted a Ruby web framework. Linus did Linux because he wanted a free Unix for his PC. No, they didn't immediately set out to extract money from their efforts (although both did become wealthy from them), but that doesn't make them altruistic.
Avoid things that cost you right now and have only a small chance of providing a return later - I would argue that, despite hindsight being 20/20, both projects had a small chance of success. Sure, they did get notoriety for them, and that was good.
Oh, and Linus got money from Red Hat and VA Linux because they were grateful. I'd argue that they weren't optimizing for personal growth there, either.
The funny thing about successful people is they are treated with great respect, while the college drop-out, street musician or starving artist doesn't get taken seriously -- until -- they become successful. And all of a sudden they can charge a nice sum for a day of talking or doing the same things they for years while mostly ignored. People love to hand out accolades, money, responsibility and respect to the same people they ignored for a long time -- after they are successful.
It is related to your observation in that I think it shows even once someone is extremely successful in their field, the context of social proof still matters a lot -- if nobody is around who "knows" you're successful, you're just some schlub in the Metro with a violin.
I assure you that's not limited to the college drop out, street musician and starving artist.
I don't think most people are taken seriously until they're successful. You're typically going to be valued based on how other people value you. It's why networks become so powerful (such as YC or Ron Conway). That's sometimes an effective system regarding efficiency of time (faster due diligence); and sometimes it's bogus when the reputation is wrong (either direction). Sometimes it accelerates innovation by getting the right people the right resources; sometimes it holds back innovation by ignoring potential buried under a non-existent reputation. The difference between being in one camp versus the other is often how hard (and intelligently) you work to get noticed. On the up side, once you're in, you're usually golden, the work to get noticed pays off.
The funny thing is that you'd pass by millions of rocks on the side of the road, but once a single one of them splits open and shows it's got gold inside then it becomes valuable to you and you stop and pick it up.
The only ones that complain are the rocks that never get picked up.
Amy Hoy calls this concept "stacking bricks" - working on project after project until you have a wall of success. Overnight successes get a lot of praise and press, but they're rare. Extremely rare. And often times a fluke rather than the result of an uncannily talented person.
You can also educate others ("sacrifice" your knowledge) while also increasing your success score. In fact, most of the people I really respect on Twitter, for example - many of which I've never met - I respect because they've taught me something. And almost all of them are financially successful.
You can also educate others ("sacrifice" your knowledge) while also increasing your success score. In fact, most of the people I really respect on Twitter, for example - many of which I've never met - I respect because they've taught me something. And almost all of them are financially successful.
But that's not self-sacrifice. As you say, it increases your own success score. Being perceived as an authority on subject X (which teaching it to others tends to do for you) is directly valuable. None of those helpful-and-successful people would be helping if the help was anonymised - because then it'd do nothing for them. That's perhaps been one of the big improvements of StackOverflow - making the value of helping others more obvious and "bankable"...
There are a lot of examples... Basically things that have a clear cost and no clear benefit (or the benefit is so far down the line and so risky that it's basically a lottery ticket).
Sacrificing all your social life for your business... rarely pays off. If you're not mentally and socially healthy, you probably won't be building a successful business.
Sacrificing your career for a startup... if the startup fails, you should still be coming out of it with a stronger CV (if that's still relevant) than you went in. However you measure it, the startup should give you more than the "I did a startup" experience even if it fails.
Saying "I don't have the time to learn X because I'm too busy doing things" is usually a good sign that you're in a self-sacrificing mindset.
Taking a significant loan/mortgage to cofound your first business, with the idea that "I'll make it back later" - that's a self-sacrifice mindset, and likely to decrease your "score".
Pulling all nighters when working for someone else, without some very clear immediate tangible (and sufficiently valuable) benefit - typical symptom of self-sacrifice. Success-minded people will save their energy for the right kind of situation that has clear benefits to themselves as well as to their employer. Those who constantly burn themselves out may well achieve success - once they learn to stop doing that.
Concrete examples from my life:
- Staying involved full-time in a venture that I didn't believe in anymore because I felt I'd be letting my cofounder down. I don't think that did him any favours either. I should have left earlier.
- Going to work even though I was on strong doses of Solpadeine+Ibuprofene just to keep my 39-degree fever down (I had a tonsil infection), because "the project needed me" - and the same for working on that project on weekends. No positive difference made to my life 5 years later (but probably some health aftereffects waiting for me a few decades down the line).
- Taking on costs I didn't need to in order to "be nice" - generally that's rarely ever appreciated or even noticed. "Les bons comptes font les bons amis", as they say in French (good accounts make good friends).
Lately, when people ask me "how do I get started learning to program?" I tell them the exact opposite of the OP.
I say, as I've been saying for years, that they should just think of something they want to build, and try to figure it out. And then I add this:
It doesn't matter if you succeed or fail. Programming is constant failure. You try something and it doesn't work. You try again and it doesn't work. You might try 50 different things before you find the one that works.
And while success might matter when you're on the job, it doesn't matter when you're learning. Because you learn exactly as much from your failures as your successes. When you figure out that Rails won't work for your streaming media server because it can't hold enough connections open, after investing weeks of investment.... great! You learned a thousand important lessons.
If you had succeeded, because you randomly chose Node.js at the start, you would've actually only learned 999 important lessons.
Which isn't to say that I disagree with the OP... often success does compound. But learning to program, at the very least, is an area where it's just Attempt--not Success or Failure-- that compounds.
I'm not sure how I could have expressed this better, but I'm not opposing success and failure, just saying that growth-minded decisions lead to more success.
Learning to program is a great example of a growth activity.
Daniel Tenner's blog is terrific, but I'd like to voice some opposition (yet again). This post is but another specimen in a long line of articles quite popular here on HN that regard life and "success" as an optimization problem. This genre is the hacker version of self-help books, and like many self-help books it assumes that 1) you have near complete control over your life and the outcome of your endeavors, and 2) that attempting to optimize all life's variables is worthwhile. I have issues with both of these assumptions.
First, much in our lives is governed by pure chance. I can't quantify exactly how much, but it's a lot. It's true that here in the West, we've managed to eliminate many forms of sudden destruction that were quite common in pre-modern life (and are quite common today in less developed countries), and when disaster strikes we have mechanisms for mitigating its effects like insurance and medicine. All this has led the Western man to believe that if he picks his priorities just so and organizes his life just right, he has a good chance of achieving any goal he sets out to achieve. This is, well, to put it simply - not true. Not only is this not true, but believing it is dangerous for two reasons: The first is that if in spite of everything you do not "succeed" you may come to believe this is the result of some personal failing; this may be, but it certainly not necessarily so. The other is that when others do not attain success you may come to believe that this is the result of some personal failing on their part - like laziness, and, again, this ain't necessarily so. Especially in America, where social mobility is so rare compared to other modern countries (though it's better than in underdeveloped nations), many failings are simply due to the environment a child was born into. But even if you're born to the right parents, disaster, and fortune will strike you at random.
My problem with the second premise, that we should even aspire to optimize our lives, is more one of a personal preference. One of my favorite books is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground". The book's protagonist has this to say:
"Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything."
"For man's everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe."
He rebels against intentionality. He balks at modern attempts to optimize life. He insists on his right to do things out of sheer spite. He want do do things that go against any common or uncommon sense. He sometimes wants to inflict pain upon himself, to wallow in the ensuing misery, and enjoy it. And though he is far from a man anyone would want to end-up like, he is a free spirit who chooses to be a slave only to his own neuroticism rather than to anyone else's utilitarian logic.
Larry Page often tells us "Aim high, not because you'll get there, but because you'll often discover things that are useful in their own right on the way there."
We can't control how things eventually turn out. But why sabotage yourself by intentionally aiming lower? We can certainly control what we put in, and if we put in more, well, we may not get what we want, but we're likely to get something that's pretty good regardless.
It is an optimization problem. It's just not a maximization problem. We try to make the best decisions we can with the information that we have available, and if those turn out not to be the best decisions in the end, well, we now have more information.
Right, as long as you remember not to look down on yourself, or more importantly, on others, if you or they do not succeed.
But my second point was a general comment about the popularity of the self-help/corporate/utilitarian discourse of "success", "usefulness", "improvement" etc.. You should improve yourself (if that's what you want), but don't become obsessed with improvement. There are other worthwhile and meaningful ways of living - just consider other options.
I'm afraid to sound new-agist ('cause I'm not), but let me suggest that the desire to improve is often the result of an external motivation such as competition. Also, "success", and "improvement" are common words in corporate-speak for two reasons: people who build corporations are often those who are obsessed with success to begin with, and second, people thinking about success and improvement tend to make better employees and better consumers. In general, people overly concerned with success and/or improvement either create authority or serve it well.
So improving yourself is certainly a great goal, but as you do it, make sure that you're improving yourself in order to serve yourself and those you love better - not someone else.
Ok, so I tried to learn PHP by creating a CRM program in that language. No really.... I succeeded in learning PHP. I was less successful in creating a CRM. Well, actually, I created a decent CRM for some markets, but failed at marketing it and eventually abandoned it. I didn't realize it at the time but this sort of thing is a key to my successes: I rarely take on a major project for one reason only. Instead I take them on for a myriad of reasons so even if the project fails, it's hardly a complete loss.
When I look back into the economic opportunities I "fell into" the same principle was at work. I did something, did it for two or three reasons, one fell through, another one became important, and suddenly my direction shifted. The same thing is now happening as well.....
In nature in a healthy ecosystem, no plant fills only a single niche, and no niche is filled by only a single species. I guess it took reading about permaculture to see some of my own patterns in a deeper light.
A pine tree very specifically only grows its vegetative part a few meters from the very top of the tree line. That's a very well defined niche.
A cave is mostly only inhabited by fungus. There you go, a niche only inhabited by a single kind of organism, and that's not even difficult to find.
Anyways, basing your behavior on how "things are in nature" is as insane as eating bark because you see a bear do it. It's stupid because analogies do not translate at all between things so distant as human and animal feeding patterns, or - in your case - yellowstone forest and business markets. Unless your CEO is Yogi Bear.
We try to make the best decisions we can with the information that we have available, and if those turn out not to be the best decisions in the end, well, we now have more information.
This really resonates well with me. Problem is that realizing what to aim for isn't that easy. A lot of people base this on financial success and the benefit of that is that it is very easy to measure, my problem with it is that financial success is being sought after because of the assumption that money brings happiness.
I admire those that put a lot of effort on problems where success isn't easily measurable. (As always, you need balance)
I beg to differ. Yes, our universe tends to maximize entropy and pure chance (or what we call it - after all it's interactions of particles/waves, no?) often affects our lives. But, if you want to cross a river, chances are much higher that you end up on the other shore than if you choose not to cross the river - perhaps a monster eagle will snatch you and carry you to the other side, but that's of very low probability.
Going in one direction (also metaphorically) always increases your chance of reaching your goal. John Nash even proved that keeping the same strategy all along will stochastically result in greater success, and he received the Nobel prize for exactly that.
I'm not disputing that there's a lot one can do to improve one's chances. I'm just saying that believing that perfect, well directed effort always breeds "success" is dangerous.
People shouldn't just sit there hoping for their luck to change (although if they do, they might still have an interesting life, even if not quite "successful"). But they shouldn't obsess about goals, self-improvement and control, either, and should learn to accept life's many surprises. Or, they can choose not to accept them and to obsess about control - hey, that's cool too. After all our existence is absurd. Life's absurd.
I don't think I ever implied that it always breeds success.
I didn't even imply that effort directed in the opposite way breeds failure. There are no doubt (rare) examples of people with a strong self-sacrificing mindset becoming successful despite those - just no one I know or have observed personally... Most lottery winners presumably fall into this category.
Chance can work both ways, but if you rely only on chance, the chance itself says you probably won't "succeed" for any given definition of success. Success is rare. Even if you fight tooth and nail you may not succeed, but you can perhaps change a 0.001% probability into a 10% probability, or a 0.01% probability into a 90% probability. That's worth fighting for.
Simple counter-example of your "chance rules all" idea: if your goal is to become a famous writer, there's nothing you can do to make success certain - but if you never write anything, you can guarantee failure.
> if your goal is to become a famous writer, there's nothing you can do to make success certain - but if you never write anything, you can guarantee failure.
I know you were using that as a counter-example but this immediately came to mind (from a successful writer)
> It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism. Wasn’t that the point of the creation – to communicate something to the world? So PUT IT OUT THERE. Send your work off to editors and agents as much as possible, show it to your neighbors, plaster it on the walls of the bus stops – just don’t sit on your work and suffocate it. At least try. And when the powers-that-be send you back your manuscript (and they will), take a deep breath and try again. I often hear people say, “I’m not good enough yet to be published.” That’s quite possible. Probable, even. All I’m saying is: Let someone else decide that. Magazines, editors, agents – they all employ young people making $22,000 a year whose job it is to read through piles of manuscripts and send you back letters telling you that you aren’t good enough yet: LET THEM DO IT. Don’t pre-reject yourself. That’s their job, not yours. Your job is only to write your heart out, and let destiny take care of the rest.
Sailing provides an apt metaphor for your point, I believe. The wind is more-or-less random, and yet if you choose a destination you will eventually get there (assuming that you know how to sail and your gear holds out, of course).
I am convinced that what most people call luck or bad luck is partly due to their own decisions (previous or current). You can't change others, but you can change yourself and most of your actions and, more importantly, your reactions. Your actions and reactions change your surroundings, and they can bring you into positions where there is more low-hanging fruit.
If people just sit there, like you said, they are not optimizing for success at all. They are just doing nothing, missing chances, waiting for something to fall into their lap. That can work, but probability of success is lower.
Life is what you make it - your opinion and view of the world definitely falls into the category "can change".
I didn't downvote you, but my guess is you're striking a chord that sounds a bit like "the secret" - whose author took that argument down to its natural conclusion and ended up declaring that the 100'000 victims of the boxing day tsunami somehow brought it on themselves...
There's a fine line between saying that you can make a difference in what happens to you, and saying that everything happens to you because of you. The latter is blatantly false, and leads to some perverted philosophies...
Anyway, that's just my guess as to why you're being downvoted...
I didn't downvote you, but my guess is you're striking a chord that sounds a bit like "the secret" - whose authors took that argument down to its natural conclusion and ended up declaring that the 100'000 victims of the boxing day tsunami somehow brought it on themselves...
That.
Of course one should try and reverse his situation to where he wants to go.
With that as a given, seeing your situation as your sole personal responsibility is a blindfold, that makes people not understanding how their society works and blaming themselves for irrational things. It also hinders progress, because it doesn't let you see and address systemic failures outside of yourself.
A black man that wanted to succeed in the '40s shouldn't just "improve himself" and "work on it", etc, he should also work with others to bring down segregation and racism. All else would be futile.
Ok well, that was not what I intended to say. I read "The Secret" years ago and it went too far in several points. But, it's a difference between refusing "The Secret", and refusing all responsibilities in life. If somebody swears at you in traffic, you decide if you just shrug on it ("He's had a bad day") or freak out, swear back, and think about it for the rest of the day.
> "If somebody swears at you in traffic, you decide if you just shrug on it ("He's had a bad day") or freak out, swear back, and think about it for the rest of the day."
and
> "I am convinced that what most people call luck or bad luck is partly due to their own decisions (previous or current)."
These two statements have no relation to each other.
The first one is obviously true. The second one is much more ambiguous - and comes with a lot of baggage. The same stance has been used to blame the victim throughout history, and continues today. For example, we continue to blame the poor for their own poverty, despite putting up barriers at every turn for them. It's a despicable stance that is entirely devoid of compassion or perspective, and does no good except to inflame the ego of the accuser.
The second argument was meant to clear up the misunderstandings about my opinion being taken out from "The Secret". They do line up, in a way: The second person would call it bad luck ("Whoa, fate gives me a hard time today"), while the first person has made no negative experience. It at least screws the perception of luck/bad luck.
You can't reason from my first argument to the second, that's correct. But it's hard to deny that we are responsible for our reactions, as illustrated by the traffic example. If life rains down on you as a startup founder (no real progress or no funding for a year), you can react by giving it all up, or just continue for some more months. The latter will increase your chances of success, naturally - it's a simple statistics game of throwing the dice more often. That's why I'm convinced that everybody forges a PART of her own destiny - it's my opinion, no fact ;)
The same stance has been used to blame the victim throughout history, and continues today. For example, we continue to blame the poor for their own poverty, despite putting up barriers at every turn for them.
Or people blame the blacks for being poor and "underachieving", not understanding that they started off in the US as slaves (much worse than anyone starting off as a poor migrant), and were still under segregation rules and heavy racism until at least the 60's.
Slave parents aren't exactly a guarantee of success. Sharecroppers parent's (the next generation) aren't either. Then, if you play your cards correctly, you end up with country and urban dirt poor parents, and maybe a small percentage of them can get to middle class --while still seen under suspicion by the wealthier and more white middle and upper class.
That a few people can overcome those things and be, say, even the first black President, doesn't mean that statistically everybody can --you don't judge a population by the outliers. The truth is, if they can get to college or get rich, for example, it's a far greatest achievement than the children of a 3rd generation immigrant achieving the same thing.
Whether a behaviour is perfect can only be judged by analyzing its outcome; that is, after the behaviour has been acted out. You cannot categorize a certain planned behaviour as perfect a priori. Anyone doing so is being stupid. Therefore you are stating a self-fulfilling prophecy in your quote that believing that perfect, well directed effort always breeds "success" is dangerous.
People should stop using the word "success" so much, because it really does seem to mean different things to different people. Of course you can abstract away the precise meaning and talk useful things about "success" and get to some generally useful conclusions - but there is limit to what you can say in general, without talking about specific values one measure one's success with. This word often seems to be a good candidate for a taboo game[1].
Regarding your point about life being unpredictable, I think this article actually provides some relief in that area. If you focus on bettering yourself constantly, adapting to circumstances, rather than sacrificing other things for a particular pie in the sky goal (aka trying to predict that it will work out in the future), you will have a better chance of achieving something big later, perhaps something you can't predict today.
That's what I took from this, anyway. I definitely am a self-sacrifice sort, so it's a relief to think that maybe I can try to gain small "boring" successes, enjoy my life along the way, and it'll help me on my way to more interesting stuff.
I think that many things in life rely on luck, unfortunately. And I think that's why a lot of people love video games. Not just for the entertainment aspect but because they know if they eventually figure out all the rules, they know if they follow a certain path, and do X, Y, Z, they will accomplish their goal. Life isn't as black and white. But I do think entrepreneurship is one of very few areas where luck doesn't play as big a part as it does in other areas.. like finding a good relationship, good health, not getting into a car accident, etc.
That's just the first stage of accepting mortality.
After that comes a life that ends up being pretty darn normal, interrupted by the occasional realization that if it all ended right now that would be just fine.
No, he just had an extra-powerful contrarian gene. Actually, like most of Dostoyevsky's characters, he was simply complex. Many of us are complex, too.
I think life is about doing. Success equals not giving up. If piling up money is important, then do things in that direction. For some people money isn't that important.
"Every decision should be optimised so that personal growth is part of the deal, and self-sacrifice is not."
My perspective is different:
Sacrifice yourself for life. Go all in! Not for yourself, your masters, or your peers, but for life itself. This isn't about success. This is about living to your fullest potential and consistently reaching a state of flow in which you are able to fully appreciate all facets of your journey, not just its end.
edit; I'm being down-voted but I did not write a content-less post. I simply disagree with the author. He is trying to optimise for success and by implication happiness, but has not considered hedonistic adaption [0] and flow states [1]. I believe his optimisations will not be fruitful long-term.
"Constantly reaching a state of flow in which you are able to fully appreciate all facets of your journey, not just its end" sounds like exactly the growth mindset I'm promoting. Self-sacrifice, on the contrary, implies ignoring the crappiness of the journey because you have some higher objective in mind.
One other aspect that is probably lurking below the surface and many of you may know but aren't focused on is that many people become a little bit successful and stop taking the risks of new endeavors. With the idea that the greatest successes are typically built on smaller successes, we also must be aware when we've found a success that placates our desires for even greater endeavors. Be happy with the things you've done(that great job, the nice house, etc) but don't stop using your current success as a building block for the next just because your current success is comfortable.
It's amusing for me that this kind of advice is taken as something novel and even inspiring, not for the advice itself or the person giving it but because it shows how deformed our post-modern perception of the world is. That most people out there actually believe they can get rich with no previous effort of any kind but a matter of "positive attitude" shows the western civilization has decayed a lot. 100 years ago the West was already centuries ahead of the rest of the world because 300 years before it refused to follow "tradition" and expect the "Gods" to provide and to taketh away. When water didn't come to us we built pumps, something as simple as that was an almost unheard-of mentality in the history of mankind, the only other exception being the complex aqueducts built by the Roman Empire. When the Romans stopped building they experienced a slow painful death, and right now we have massive infrastructure deficits which go unfixed because well, any serious infrastructure project is measured in decades, so how do you take credit of that? If you're a politician you won't be in office by the time it's done, and with the increasing instability of the markets investors will probably have moved on to something else more than once by the time the project ends. One would believe than with our average lifespan more than doubling in the past 200 years we should be able to think further ahead, but in reality the post-modern society its fixated on the present, as if the future, a time other than now, was a concept so abstract our brains couldn't process it.
Great thinking - but I think the dichotomy of self-sacrifice vs growth is not the most useful conceptual model. I found the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in 'The two paths to success' to be more relatable when it comes to optimizing for growth.
Focus on self-sacrifice could be described as an intrinsically motivated activity to optimize for personal growth in realizing the ideal of benefitting others. For me, these intrinsic cycles have been self-benefitting - a focus on a particular product, or a focus on growth of engineering skills. In both cases, relationships suffer, bank accounts dip - but at the end of the cycle I have a more evolved product or a much stronger set of engineering skills.
Extrinsic motivation will optimize for a different set of success criteria. Maybe growing skills not as important at this phase, but perhaps growth in relationships, self-promotion and financial gains are the better opportunity to grow.
Yes, growth is the basis of success, but interest is only part of the magic - perhaps more important is arbitraging the value created as you switch between these 2 contexts of motivation.
I believe LIFE IS A RANDOM GAME. You may argue that hard working can change the fate. Yes. But hard working should also be seen as an attribute that is set in your body when you are born, and it is random. So a person is created with random attributes, and he will live with random chances happening around him. That's the game of life.
Vince Lombardi's famous quote "Winning is a habit" comes to mind. I think what makes successful people successful is this attitude that no matter what they do, regardless of it's significance, they give it all they have. They want to win (using some subjective definition of winning).
I highly recommend reading James Wallace's "Hard Drive" (http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/...) which provides some insight into Bill Gates. Regardless of your thoughts about the man, I think it is an extremely interesting read. The basic premise is that Gates is extremely competitive even on a minuscule scale, and it is due to that obsession & competitiveness he is where he is today.
He's basically saying that constant reinvestment of your capital leads to ever increasing success (and maybe, one day, blockbuster success).
I took my savings from my first job, went back to university to learn programming, then got a job with over double the salary. Now earn enough to save money (not that much, maybe a few thousand a year), and also learn a lot of new skills on the job (finance). I've avoided things that take up all my surplus cash/time... But I'm not sure how to 'reinvest' at this point. One obvious choice is doing a CFA (company pays the bills but it would be a huge timesink). Or I could try iOS or web development and use my money to get outside help where needed to make a good product. Or i could invest in stocks/bonds or something.
Anyone else care to share their history of, uh, reinvestment success?
I think there's actually a balance between the self-sacrifice view and the optimization view. Your parents have to sacrifice to give you care and attention. Likewise, you have to sacrifice to build skills. All along, chance factors come in to affect whether you're going to remain a healthy person, or crippled/dead.
However, once you cross certain thresholds of ability, optimization becomes a preferred solution. Networking starts to matter more. To build a desired connection you can "sacrifice for someone else." Once you have the connections, unique chances to work on ideas pass through you, and as we already know, ideas + opportunity are prerequisite to most forms of "success." Once you have that, the self-sacrifice process starts again, as now you have to prove that it can be done.
I agreed with the post until I got to the self sacrifice portion. Life isn't a zero sum game. When you help others, you're helping yourself at the same time.
I've always followed a pay it forward even with people I've met for the first time and it has paid for itself time and time again. Watch how fast someone comes running when they hear you need a favor when they've received one from you...]
The other point I'd like to make is that I believe happiness and success go hand and hand. I know a lot more selfless happy people than selfish ones. Of course, success isn't one dimensional and if monetary measurements are the only indicator then....
Totally agree - but I still think some amount of sacrifice is necessary at the beginning, when you finish your education and start with 0 (if you're lucky, some have student loans).
I am at this very point at the moment (finishing master thesis), and my parents are not wealthy - I've been earning my own money since 17. Thinking that you start with 0 is IMHO a fallacy (if you are staying within the same industry). If you are no antisocial you have made at least 1-2 (or better: 10-20) good friends at college/school with whom you can team up, or build your network. If you haven't, reach out to your ex project group partners.
Many ex-students think that they don't deserve high wages yet - "I have to learn X,Y,Z,... until I can demand X$". Thing is that we never stop learning, and you HAVE to charge money for learning. Projects are by definition a nonrecurring enterprise (else you could fully automate the outcome), so there will always be things to learn to finish it.
If you think that your skills are not worth a lot of money, you will not even try and demand it - that makes it exactly a zero chance of earning a lot. For many people the only thing that separates them from earning much is their self-confidence (or confidence in their skills) - or choice of wrong market/industry (what are my talents?), but that's a different post.
a lot of people view the project work that they do in college as "sacrifice". but really? if you have a challenging curriculum, those projects become successes (perhaps your first successes) that you build on professionally.
your friends new coworkers ask "wow, this new kernel hacker came out of nowhere!" but you say "well if you had watched them through college, it was just success building on success ..."
As far as I can tell, he's not saying that one should never sacrifice... just that if you do, try to align the situation so there is a payoff for YOU down the line. Education can be one of those things.
I personally don't think that education is a self-sacrifice activity... or if it is, you're studying the wrong things. University is a gigantic opportunity to make vast numbers of valuable connections, learn lots of interesting things, develop as a human being, and even gain some valuable credentials that will make earning money easier.
Of course, it's a bit overpriced in America at the moment, but that doesn't mean that education in general is a bad deal. On the contrary.
I went to UBC (British Columbia, Canada) and the tuition cost as of today is $400+ per course. If a student enrols to 12 courses/year that comes down to $4800/year or $19.2k/4-years. Less than $5k/year is probably not too bad for a mid-tier University (e.g.: not MIT level).
Of course "not to bad" is because I compared it with our 2 weeks Caribbean escapade last year where we spent probably between $4k to $5k in total for 2 people. Or a ticket price, round-trip, flying to Indonesia that cost around $1.5k+/person during "shoulder season".
As a side note: Microsoft offers interns about $5k/month for 3-months (or 4-months, depending on your program). If interns can live frugally in Seattle/Redmond (corporate housing with roommate), they probably can afford to pay 1-2 years worth of education from one internship period.
UC must be one of the expensive schools. The average isn't too bad:
"In 2011-12, public four-year colleges charge, on average, $8,244 in tuition and fees for in-state students. The average surcharge for full-time out-of-state students at these institutions is $12,526."
That average includes some a large number of schools that many high-achievers wouldn't consider as they won't meet many other high achievers there, nor will they meet many high achieving faculty.
If an American is unable to get merit scholarships at top schools, they're likely looking at $100-200k in tuition and expenses for a BS.
No matter how it seems, success is seldom if ever "overnight". Yes, it may seem things come easier to some than others, but to me personally... success isn't what you accomplish so much as it is how quickly you get up from constantly being knocked down. I've failed more times than I care admit... and I'm probably better for it. Maybe success looks like a pattern of determination.
>If you're going to work on a startup, plan things out so that even if it fails without making a single ripple, you'll still be better off after than you were before.
I've been thinking about this lately. It's really important to chose to spend time on things that are positive for you whether the primary aim or best case scenario pans out or not. Great post.
Having a self-sacrifice mind-set means consistently making decisions that benefit someone or something other than yourself, and often at a cost to yourself.
This is a very rational way of looking at things, much too rational to describe a "mind-set." From the point of view of most of our brain, the parts of our brain we've lived with our whole lives but still have a hard time communicating with, investing in yourself is self-sacrifice. You sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term pleasure. You even sacrifice short-term success for long-term success. The long-term success is off the radar of most of your brain, so you need a mindset that sees your "sacrifice" in a positive light.
For example, getting up early and knocking out an extra feature at work brings you immediate positive rewards. People notice it, and they notice you. That's relatively easy, a lower form of self-sacrifice. Staying up late studying linear algebra or a new concurrency paradigm doesn't bring you any immediate external rewards. (Sometimes you get the joy of understanding a major new idea, but more often it's just hard work.) It will bring rewards someday, but that pleasure is off your radar. You need a psychological connection between the pleasure you pass up today and a reward that is unspecified and even unimaginable because it is impossible to predict in any concrete detail.
One way of making that psychological connection is the concept of sacrifice, which often shows up as an important aspect of religious faith. Acting correctly now will bring rewards in the future: in the afterlife, in the next lifetime, or if you believe in the "Prosperity Gospel," next quarter. Christianity explicitly promotes sacrifice by setting up Jesus as the highest model for emulation, and by adopting the symbol of his sacrifice as the symbol of the religion itself.
I am not religious myself, but I think it is significant that we selfish, self-interested human beings are attracted to the power of sacrifice embodied in the story of Jesus(+). Perhaps it has something to do with the potential we see to better our own lives and the lives of the people we care about if only we had the discipline to sacrifice ourselves to what we value. Setting aside the moral question of whether it is appropriate to value our own well-being more highly than that of another person, it is painfully obvious that we value the well-being of ourselves today much more highly than the well-being of ourselves next year, or even next week. If our psychological concept of self and selfishness cannot extend to the person we will be next week, then perhaps it is in our long term self-interest to develop a mentality that helps us sacrifice ourselves to something that is (or merely seems) separate from us.
There are other ways to tackle the problem, but no single strategy will take us very far by itself. Cultivating a sense of intrinsic pleasure in the deferred-reward activities that we substitute for immediate-reward activities helps, but it can be overwhelmed by factors that affect mood, such as fatigue, problems in other areas of our lives, or simply having a bad day. Imagining the rewards can help, but sometimes the rewards are uncertain or unknowable. Pride can be a useful tool, but when we're tackling challenging work or something we aren't very good at, pride is sometimes best kept out of the picture. Sometimes stuff just sucks, and the only thing we can do is embrace the pain as evidence that we are following the right path.
Obviously there are pitfalls. You need to guide your sense of sacrifice so that it serves whatever you think is important. (Your children, your career, your guild, your six-pack abs, whatever.) Some people blindly sacrifice themselves for whoever walks by, hoping to find someone who returns the favor, so there's no arguing that a sense of self-sacrifice can express itself pathologically when it's poorly directed. Still, I think self-sacrifice is not just a morally beautiful idea, but a pragmatic way of pursuing your own interest as well.
(+) Religion is a worthwhile subject for HNers who are interested in "success literature" articles like this one. A common feature of all major religions is that there is an optimal way to live that brings the highest reward, but our morally or intellectually flawed selves naturally revolt from that path and seek lesser pleasures, which ultimately lead to disappointment or even punishment. Religion is the struggle to understand the higher path, detach ourselves from the compelling illusions that dominate our behavior, and attune ourselves to the highest source of good so we can follow it with conviction. Many articles on HN read the same way if you define success as the highest good.
...investing in yourself is self-sacrifice. You sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term pleasure. You even sacrifice short-term success for long-term success. The long-term success is off the radar of most of your brain, so you need a mindset that sees your "sacrifice" in a positive light.
But that's not self-sacrifice by my definition, because you're still the one reaping the benefit. Getting up early to do work that will benefit someone else and not yourself - that is self-sacrifice. Getting up early to get ahead in your studies is just self-discipline.
Like I said, rationally speaking, you're right, but mind-sets don't matter when you can analyze something rationally and follow your decision without difficulty. A mind-set comes into play when a problem is rationally intractable or emotionally vexed.
I don't believe that success is a life long habit for most people. I think successful people learn how to be successful through trial and error.
There are formulas for success and failure. Some people learn faster, some people learn slower; some lessons are better than others and get you there faster; some people are fortunate enough to be able to fail in more modest ways while they're simultaneously being successful in the grand scheme of things (Zuck). Sometimes randomosity bails you out of stupid choices, sometimes you hit the floor hard; the choice to learn or not is up to the individual either way.
Some people become successful early, and fail late. The list of former Forbes 400 members is littered with these people. Some people fail early, and succeed later, and for the rest of their lives, having learned their lesson.
In my experience, failure can feel a bit like living through a great depression. You become emotionally reflexive based on what you've learned / digested. Same way people learned to be extremely frugal after The great depression. If you learn the right lessons from it, your reflexes will keep you from making similar stupid mistakes later on. I don't know how you really learn those lessons without experiencing them (even if you do so in the 'fail small and often, while succeeding overall' manner).
I think I might have miscommunicated. I'm not referring to success in contrast to its supposed opposite of failure. Successful people fail. A lot. However, I believe that they do have a habit/mindset of making decisions that benefit them (and, often, others, but always themselves too) rather than hurting themselves.
This is contrasted with the self-sacrifice mindset, where a person makes decisions that will hurt them and benefit other people or no one.
Also, worth pointing out that I never intended to imply that this "lifelong habit" can't be acquired. I'm slowly getting there, and I started from a strong self-sacrificing mindset.
how do you actually know you "slowly getting there"? how do you measure that? and IF you can measure and know what it means to "already be there", wouldn't you actually... be there?
A lot of our behaviours and responses are driven by subconscious habits and thoughts. I may know that I have a bias towards doing X, but that doesn't mean that I consistently avoid doing X - in fact, quite the opposite. It takes years of re-training your subconscious to get away from behaviours which have become habitual. Knowing the way and walking the way are two different things, as they say.
I know I'm slowly getting there because I can observe the direct correlation between how I've shifted my thought patterns, and how the situation around me has shifted. One could posit coincidence as an explanation, and that may be true, but the areas of my life where I don't apply this "growth" mindset are the ones that haven't grown. Try it for yourself and see if it does anything for you.
Another example, with contrast between areas where I'm applying the mindset and those where I'm not: learning. In my work, I've blown away the excuse that "I don't have the time to learn" - I was lucky that the circumstances forced me to. As a result, I am now basically an expert on tax credits and grants, and adding more similar fields as time passes, without any hesitation.
Conversely, I've had a "I just need to get things done" attitude to programming and fiction writing over the last few years, and those have budged little if at all. I know that's the wrong mindset, but it takes time to get over it.
> Many people think it makes sense to sacrifice everything for some elusive success that's waiting a few years down the line when their startup makes it big.
Yep, it's a sucker's bet. You only get one shot at life, and you should be living it, not dreaming of the day when you can. And big things promised in the future have a funny way of not actually arriving.
Instead of growth, I think you should have use the idea of investment. One chooses how you to spend his time, and that may be in learning new tools, creating a product, or non-work related things.
Self-sacrifice is the key to producing strong personal relationships, and not something that should be rejected based on a faulty association with time spent in business. Whether one works for himself or another, it is not self-sacrifice; rather, it is toward the reward. Self-sacrifice for personal reward is no longer self-sacrifice.
Success in business or wealth (which seems to be your focus) may be completely unrelated to other people's definitions of success. One may choose not to invest his time toward monetary success because he defines success not by becoming rich but by enjoying strong relationships with his family. Note that I am not saying that one cannot be "successful" at both, but there are many who have become wealthy to the detriment of everything I would consider success. To me they are wealthy or well-known, but truly failures.
Acting for the benefit of others does not have to be to one's own detriment, and relationships without self-sacrifice are ultimately doomed.