Working at a startup helmed by a "brilliant" man as mentioned in the article, I wholeheartedly agree. So much hand waving. So little execution. One month, we were doing one thing that "had to be in the app". Another month, something else. Neither would get the actual attention that needed for them to be implemented properly, and nothing of value was produced.
Society places too much importance on the buds of ideas. True, an idea can change the world. But what gets lost in the shuffle is the fact that what truly matters is in those ideas being executed and turned into something tangible.
The charismatic idea men are a dime a dozen. I'm sure everyone here has worked with some hand-waving, smooth talking salesman who wows investors, then fail hard at meeting promises. It's those who can execute that are truly transformative.
I find that the "idea" person must really find a partner who can edit and curate his ideas. At the same time the partner who is doing the editing has to have enough social skill to know how to keep an "idea person" from getting anxious and changing course all the time.
If both people have respect and trust for each other I think it's one of the strongest partnerships you can have. If one bullies the other around though, then that's when it usually breaks down.
Exactly my experience. I have the luck to work with what are basically geniuses, guys that were hacking at 12. Two decades later they are unstoppable.
Brilliant people have the productivity of 5 normal coders, but you have to constantly rotate among projects, or they will get bored incredibly rapidly. Writing the final reports is torture to them.
Incidentally (And I welcome negative points here) a great indicator of the capacity to focus for a long time on boring things and finish, should be college. It's no wonder many hacker geniuses can't finish it.
I hear you. I once worked at a company that went down the tubes because they gave an idea guy free rein and he was depending on underwear gnomes. It was a profitable $40m company when I arrived, but I saw the writing on the wall and left after three years. Two years later one of its competitors bought it for a song.
It's sad how this sounds so plausible and valid... because even today, we are incredibly bad at managing (or making use of or integrating into a team...) brilliant people and we fail to make use of them and we let them fail because we can only figure out how to make reliable profit by using readily available mediocrity.
We should instead learn to recognize human diversity and accept that besides the "well rounded hard worker" that needs to make up at least 50% of any team, we also need to find ways of making use and helping thrive:
- the always starters: the guys that always start new things and have new ideas (that actually work!) but maybe never finish anything -- maybe we should stop pressing them to finish, just rotate them from one department to another and then let the rest work to bring his works to completion
- the motivation dynamites: the people whose minds go up in fire and also set fire to the minds of people around them -- maybe we should use them by rotating them to projects that lack motivation, or use them to launch viral social media campaigns or something
- the distracted geniuses: the thing with the "distracted genius" is that if you teach him how to "focus", he become way more productive but stops being a genius, and you then have another a-little-above-average-chap -- maybe we should use the "ideas volcanos" as a competitive advantage and stop telling them to focus, like encourage them to publish their ideas that cannot be implemented online on a company blog - yeah, the competition will steal some of them, but your company will become uber-attractive and everyone will want to work for "a company from which so many uber-cool ideas come from"
...and then there's the generalization that most of these types of brilliant people are essentially not team players -- they shouldn't be forced to work as part of one team or stick to a team: maybe a corporate environment may just perpetually rotate them from one team/project to another, not even bothering to let them finish what they are doing; maybe a startup should stop trying to get them on-board and just keep them as well paid consultants (and allow them to consult for even a dozen other companies at the same time to keep their minds busy).
...and maybe all the ideas above are wrong, but the point is that we are incredibly bad at making use of brilliant people in business context and focusing on "just use hard working average joes" instead is an avoidance of the problem, not a solution!
A lot of people want to be "the idea guy", because it's cool and relatively easy. The problem is that ideas are cheap.
The value of any given idea is really low - I would argue that for many organisations ideas even have a negative value on average, because you are going to spend a lot of time dealing with the idea without it actually becoming something that generate value in the end.
Even if you have an idea, that works, and that will generate significant value if realised, until that idea IS realised, it is a negative cost.
People who can generate a large amount of those ideas are a commodity.
People who can cheaply identify an idea that can be realised and that have access to resources to realise it, and that can go through the process of actually realising the idea are not a commodity.
The bottle neck for putting new ideas to market is not the idea generation, and so the people who consider themselves "always starters" is not a scarce resource, hence I dont need to rotate them from department to department - every department I have already have access to more than enough good ideas, so adding the "always starter" to that department would be a negative cost.
I would agree if you mean average idea. Really great ideas are rare, difficult, and can change the world. The people who come up with those are rather special.
And, unfortunately, rare, and almost never (in my somewhat limited experience) think of themselves as 'idea guys.'
But this hivemind (nicely crurated by VCs- think that through) that ideas are worthless is very wrong. Unfortunately, discussions about it tend to start conflating ideas and execution- as, indeed, it is hard to separate them when you get down to it.
Yeah I mean "If I am operating a business and someone brings an idea for something we should do inside that business, the expected value of that idea is close to 0, and for some business it may be negative".
That doesnt say that all ideas are useless. Huge businesses are built off of ideas all the time. Whether it be by accidental timing, cutting edge research, new synergy opportunities or actively spotting a hole that can be filled, the businesses start with an idea and they are not useless for sure.
Once you are up and operating a business however, if an idea is not about something you can trivially do as part of daily operations (continuous improvement has amazing value) but rather is something you need to divert significant resources or attention to in order to potentially realize some other values, then the value of the idea itself, on average, is low, because you will have a lot of these ideas, and you will not be able to dedicate your resources and attention to more than a few of them at a time.
It is far more valuable (on average) to be able to effectively choose WHICH of the already existing ideas have the best return than being able to add another idea to the pile.
Really great ideas also have low value. Even the most brilliant idea will have been had by countless people before it is known to the world.
The truly rare, difficult and world-changing is the realization (production, enactment, what have you) of a really great idea, and the luck of that realization occurring in the right context.
> The truly rare, difficult and world-changing is the realization (production, enactment, what have you) of a really great idea, and the luck of that realization occurring in the right context.
Nonetheless that doesn't make the idea itself worth little (let alone nothing). By analogy, land is normally little use unless you put a building or infrastructure on it or start farming or mining it. And it's seriously expensive and difficult to do those things. But that doesn't make the value of land low. Land isn't just valuable, it's expensive in the most literal and straightforward you-pay-money-for-it sense, sometimes staggeringly so.
Land is sort of a good example (there is scarcity involved, which makes it not a perfect analogy).
Land doesn't have any intrinsic value. There are two reasons (unused) land has value:
1) Someone expects to be able to use it to create value
2) Someone expects that someone else will want to use it to create value in the future and they expect that scarcity will come into play allowing them to charge more for it in the future than it currently costs to buy.
Land is only staggeringly expensive if either the value expected to be generated from 1) is exceptionally high or the expected value someone else will generate from it in 2) is exceptionally high.
If those aren't in play, you can get land very cheaply, or even for free, or in extreme cases be paid to take over land (that usually only applies for contaminated land etc).
To a first approximation, the good ideas are precisely those which can be used to create a lot of value: they're the land in Shanghai. It's not clear to me in what sense of 'intrinsic value' such land or ideas would lack it while (say) a pile of high-quality bricks would not. Conversely, if ideas are worthless only in the sense that building materials or pig-iron are worthless then in any ordinary sense they are not worthless at all.
Obviously ideas are less reliably scarce than land, because a number of people can have the same idea independently, and also because once another person hears your idea they can steal your fire without paying you, so it's difficult to trade an idea in a way that doesn't remove your ability to capture the value from it. But a high-quality and unobvious idea tends to occur to only a few people at any time, and the awkwardness of trying to do deals with them is far from rendering them valueless either. It's certainly not the case that good ideas are plentiful in the sense that if there one specific good idea to solve your problem but you don't think of or hear of it, then don't worry, there are lots of similarly good and suitable ideas lying around and one is almost certain to come to your attention soon.
A different, and notable distinction between land and ideas is that people are usually better at recognising valuable land than good ideas, as Frank Aiken observed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken . This is one reason why some ability to "finish" (in terms of external circumstances as well as internal factors like temperament and character) is such a valuable accompaniment to having a good idea: it helps to have something relatively tangible (be it only a prototype) to force down others' throats.
Most ideas aren't that brilliant. If it occurred to you, it likely occurred to somebody else. Ideas are a product of your environment. While we pretend to be unique a lot of what we do is pretty common to dozens, if not hundreds, or thousands of people.
Even ideas as earth shaking and complex as Infinitesimal Calculus and Quantum Mechanics were developed in parallel initial by people with little to no communication between each other.
Broad elevator-pitch-level ideas may well be of little value, but specific ideas about strategy for a given organization at a given time are hugely valuable. There is a significant difference betwen the ideas person who just spouts out 'x for y' type product ideas, and the ideas person who is always coming up more effective processes for getting work done and achieving goals.
Even those specific ideas have value only speculatively; specific case hypotheses are more easily testable, but they only have value, only provide benefit, when results of execution are realized.
(a-priori: for some reason I can't reply directly to you)
It's not quite a "no true Scotsman" since great ideas do happen and happen fairly often, in the grand scheme of things (there are over 100 Nobel prize nominees every year). The oft-repeated argument about ideas versus execution is that ideas are a dime a dozen, which is true, but most of them are not really all that great or original. The same can be said for any resource.
> as, indeed, it is hard to separate them when you get down to it
Indeed. For one thing, probably nearly anyone who has successfully had good ideas is a "finisher" to some extent (though to very varying extents). Isaac Newton certainly thought hard and persevered in his researches, but as soon as you're bringing him in as an example of a "finisher" as opposed to an "ideas man" you've pretty badly undermined any distinction you were building between the two.
"The idea guy" is not brilliant guy.
From my understanding, the brilliant guy should clearly know when, what ,how to do the correct thing. The "correct" thing is which may suit for current business demand or for future business requirement.
I agree with you so completely. I have seen this all my life, especially with myself. The things I am proud of are not those brilliant ideas lying half finished somewhere. It is those imperfect, simple things that I finished but which work and which still work now and which are a continual source of pleasure.
I love starting phase of a new projects too. However, I believe that working only on starting phase of many projects would be detrimental for the person. Later phases of the projects often gives you feedback on how well you have done in the beginning. If you participate only on beginning (design mostly), you will miss that feedback and you will not even know it.
What looks like great clever idea in the beginning sometimes turns out to be too difficult to maintain down the road. The new technology or approach that speeds you up so incredibly during first weeks can became huge drag withing few months. Smart clever hacks so cool first six weeks can make the system extremely fragile twelve months later.
Your projects rotating starter never involved in later phases of the projects may become problem on himself.
Second argument is about fairness. Finishers are not people who love to do all that less exciting work needed to actually
finish the thing. Neither are they too stupid to work on design phase.
Most often, they are people who feel responsibility towards project completion. If you do not allow them to work on those interesting parts too and force them to fix other peoples bugs all the time, they are likely to leave for another company.
I have the feeling, that everyone who don't want to do real work, is this kind of person...
There are a big bunch of people out there with ideas, but only a fraction of them will realize their ideas.
This is why there are "non-technical-founders" (I have this idea, I just need someone _helping_ me to implement it) and why developers are paid so much money.
Because everyone can have ideas, but not everyone can make them work.
On the other hand, technical founders can make the idea work, but can't get people to use it, which makes it just as worthless (with a lot of wasted time and added stress, to boot). An "ideas guy" who can actually sell those ideas is pretty valuable.
That is not an "ideas guy"; that is a "sales person". And a strong sales person is essential and actually adds value. While some technical founders can also be great sales people; it is uncommon so this is a good pairing.
When people say "ideas guy", at least in my local techno-sphere, it means the person that has "some great idea", but no skills to implement, no skills to sell it, and no money to back it.
We get "idea guys" at our tech meetups on a somewhat regular basis. They just show up one day, and it's always the same thing, "So I have this great idea to do X, but I don't know how to program. I don't have any money to pay anyone, but I'll give you a 10% equity to build my idea. Huh?, no no I don't have any existing customer relationships either. Now which one of you can get this done the fastest?"
On the other hand we have people that fit into one of the 3 necessary/valuable categories (Implementers/Sellers/Financial Backers). People in all 3 of these categories have ideas and add real value.
See this Charlie Rose interview with Jim Collins on his new book, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck -- Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, where Jim talks about what it takes for a genius/artist to thrive (http://www.hulu.com/watch/298461).
Maybe these "always starters" and "distracted geniuses" are in search for truth and purity -- for meaning -- and are continuously iterating on and refining their value system in such a way that their values change between the time they start exploring an idea until the time they understand the idea. Or maybe their values don't change during the process, but once they fully understand the idea they were exploring, they find it's not valuable enough for them to commit more time to, even though others might find it valuable.
Jim's research reveals that the big things happen at the rare cross between creativity and discipline. It's the genius/artist who when they see and set their hands on the big thing, they grab it by the throat and don't let go.
Maybe the path to this intersection of creativity and discipline is for the genius/artist to first focus on peeling back the layers within themselves -- to spend time contemplating until they find their core values -- to "know thyself" -- and then once they have gotten to the root, they'll have the clarity of purpose needed to align their core values with their work and will be able to pursue their life's purpose without being distracted by frivolous matters.
Though I really like your idea, and think that I may fit into 1 or more categories described in your post, I don't think it is a good thing for the brilliant guy.
The world only remembers the one who finishes, rather than the one who throws out an idea and then walks off. It may be easy for the brilliant guy to find excuses to not make more commitment and finish, he's just being either lazy or inconfident to implement his own idea. If he never finishes a thing, how can he know if it is good or not? how can he gather more practical experience?
It may or may not be good for the employer, it is definitely bad for the employeed to indulge in not having to finish.
The thing is that there's huuuuuge road between 'kind-of-working prototype' and 'something deliverable to the client'. And it takes very different kinds of people for the portions of it.
A "brilliant never-finisher" is great for the idea->'kind-of-working prototype'/PoC, and yes, I think they should struggle to at least get to this, not just throw an idea. But the thing is that this is usually just 20% of the road, and they'd bee useless or even damaging for the rest of the 80%, so it's better to let them move on. And the 'damaging' part is very real (!!): someone who keeps pouring new and better ideas into a project that already has the ideas it needs to be a product is actually bringing negative value by increasing time-to-market, even if everyone only perceives the fact that the product would not even exist without him and that all his ideas are great.
By letting the 'brilliant non finisher' start a new project (just give him something challenging and an almost-zero budget until he's really needed again if the company doesn't have the resources for something else), you're avoiding a potential big loss or even a catastrophic failure (imagine the competition brings something inferior to market, grabs to whole market share, and then even poaches the brilliant guys from you afterwards). The only cost to pay would be that you need to keep paying the brilliants for the rest 80% of project duration to keep them for feedback and new projects, while they climb rocks or sip cocktails and you and the rest of the team sweat your guts out (hard to swallow) OR finance some micro-pet-projects to keep their minds working (hard to support).
Prototyping and R&D seems to be a great place for these people. Build MVP, start to build things up on the business end, show its potential, hand off to engineering and let them productionize it. "Idea men" have to at least bring their ideas to the point of implementation.
Alternatively, working on tooling, libraries, tricky bug fixes and other odds and ends may be good projects for the inattentive.
Indeed, he's definitely talking about SALES people, who use their sales tactics to sell him on themselves. Definitely not talking about "book smarts" brilliance. The author probably intentionally mistitled the story for attention.
That said, there's a good lesson - if you hire sales people, their most attractive target will always be selling themselves to the guy who's writing their paycheck. It will not automatically be the actual customers or whatever you think their incentives are "supposed" to be.
The weird thing is, why didn't he hire this person in a way that posed less risk to his business? Why is he handing over a gigantic check worth 140,000 of today's dollars? Isn't this person crazy, or at least a terrible businessman? Yet here we all are, listening to his advice. The longer I think about this the more I dislike it.
It sounds like just 40% of a year's severance. Not too much to walk away.
And it's a parable, not a true story. The timing was 1924 - the roaring 20s. It's a commentary against the flashy types, in defense of the folks who put their heads down and work.
Um, he's using this whole episode as an example of what not to do, not what to do. He says right out that hiring that person that way was a mistake. The whole point of the article is to help people avoid the mistakes the author made. How many articles that get to HN's front page are basically the same thing?
If I repeatedly get fucked up and crash Fords over the course of my life while having much better luck with other cars, I might start looking for a causal relationship.
Exactly: that's what the author of the piece is doing. He's had bad luck with a certain type of person while having much better luck with other types of people, and he's analyzing the reasons for that.
I agree it's a terrible hiring mistake. But this is a story about a mistake he made. Without it, there would be no story. (And hopefully he didn't make the same mistake afterward)
Exactly. The lesson isn't to not hire brilliant or average people, but to trial people more gradually. The made up story also attempts to draw a conclusion from an anecdotal level of "evidence." Doesn't seem to stick for some reason.
Risk reductions can be:
- invite people over to hang out, hack on something, or work on whatever they're working on
- start people on a contract gig
- maybe another contract or what works for them
- have an extremely informal non-interview, interview process
- trial period
- eventually FTE status in a set time-frame if both sides want it
I prefer working on contracts that are renewed every now and then. In that way my contributions are constantly evaluated and if for some reason I'm not producing results then there's not a lot of drama involved in letting me go. And I think taking pressure of of clients helps them in the long run to focus on results vs just my salary.
I think that's actually his point: that its better to hire an ordinary employee who will work hard at a realistic goal than to hire a flighty genius, whether self-appointed or not.
"Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do."
"These are quite simple rules...No Edison could ever qualify."
I hate thinking like this. You can't say Edison didn't have a monumental impact in getting electricity to proliferate at reasonable prices across the country.
No, but you can say he wasn't a genius. In a way that makes his achievements more impressive: he wasn't the smartest kid in class, but he worked hard (and fought dirty) and turned himself into a household name.
He was good at it. He was no genius. Tesla turned out to be the better showman. Edison's envy of Tesla's flair for the dramatic led him directly to his ghastly practice of electrifying stray animals to portray AC as unsafe. Whereas Tesla almost managed to get a gigantic pie-in-the-sky wireless power transmission experiment funded using little more than his famous mad-scientist mystique. Edison couldn't hope to inspire that kind of patronage and had to rely on more prosaic methods.
What Edison did possess was a remarkable capacity for what he called "hard work". Making the light bulb practical was something anybody could have done, if they'd had the willingness to burn through months of time and money performing dull experiments over and over and over again.
There was still a lot of low-hanging technological fruit in Edison's day, but 'low-hanging' didn't mean 'easy'. He made a business out of working harder than anyone else did to make contraptions practical.
People pooh-pooh him as unoriginal, dull, but that's the sort of man his work needed. He was also smarter than people gave him credit for, though he didn't match the sheer brilliance of Tesla. His industrial research facility at Menlo Park was the first of its kind, he set a lot of standards in the field and had a lot of influence. It's considered by many to be his most important innovation.
Agreed. His hard work actually fits the article's concept of a non-genius pretty well. He had a very strong constitution.
One thing is a little misleading though: he established a laboratory, with a group of inventors. I believe this was the first industrial-scale research laboratory in the world - like PARC. So much of the "hard work" is the hard work of all these other men - and they happily welcomed his name on their invention, even in cases where he didn't do much, they wanted his name there.
So although he did invent a lot personally, perhaps his greatest achievement was being able to lead and inspire intelligent and hard-working men to do what he did (as you say). Jobs and Wozniak rolled into one.
Employees still optimize for pay / effort, NOT absolute pay. In that respect, commissions are still FAR from perfectly aligning incentives.
You can't really be suggesting that commissions are the silver bullet for aligning incentives, as if that hasn't been tried for thousands of years already, with very mixed success :)
I'm not suggesting there is a "silver bullet" for aligning incentives that exists (commissions can be abused by focusing on short term gains at the detriment of the companies long term goals etc etc), but commissions for goal completion is a step in the right direction compared to just writing someone a blank check because their resume looks pretty.
Additionally, employees optimizing for pay/effort instead of max pay is still a win for the company so long as the employee brings in marginally more than they cost.
This was a beautifully written piece, but that's exactly the impression I came away with.
It's been written on HN many times that work sample tests are very important in hiring decisions. Perhaps this is just more evidence of that. The good news is that it's much more practical to give such tests in software development than in sales (to my knowledge).
It wasn't just word of mouth but he was also dazzled by what these geniuses were telling him and their enthusiasm. Eventually he realized he needed employees who can deliver more than talk.
As mathattack has correctly pointed out in a comment an hour ago, this is a parable (a made-up story). The huge salary by that day's standards should make that clear. But the unnamed author makes his hiring methods look stupid, because he should be doing a work-sample test[1] before hiring for such an expensive contract. If he doesn't know what the worker will actually do, he shouldn't put so much money on the line.
[1] My FAQ on company hiring procedures as posted earlier on HN:
The effectiveness of various hiring methods has been demonstrated pretty rigorously now. But how many companies now take them into account, neverminding 1924?
I'd probably be more expecting a Belbin or Myers-Briggs questionnaire to be required, than a work-sample test, to have my suitability tested for certain roles, despite the established effectiveness of various methods.
There's a lot of things people should have been doing in 1924, but weren't. I mean, if we're judging by modern standards, allowing women and minorities into senior roles would be one of them.
How, exactly, do you do a work-sample test for a chief sales executive anyway? "Hey, can you run our global sales division for a couple of hours, then we can evaluate if your methods really bring in the sales"?
Edit: to clarify on the work-sample question, in the story, the employee has been expressly hired to teach the existing staff new methods, which they actively recognise that they don't understand. How do you make a meaningful work-sample test for a sales chief that can be interpreted by a naif?
That doesn't tell me how the applicant will manage a department or implement new techniques. It's a test for line sales staff, not departmental managers.
Just out of curiosity, not being a salesman, is a great salesman actually expected to be able to sell anything to anyone?
Bragging aside, I would assume this is one of those cases where a huge portion of the job is differentiating likely and unlikely sales targets, and applying effort accordingly.
I think everyone should be highly suspicious of charisma. Charisma is a skill, not a trait, and it's developed by spending a lifetime practicing on people that one thinks are largely beneath one's self.
I think Charisma is a trait, not a skill. It is an aspect which just makes people "want to hear you". And that is extremely risky: Charismatic people can make everything sound good. They can hold the most dumb and unfounded position in an argument and still win, just because they are charismatic. And that is dangerous. One charismatic person can make for a meteoric rise of a company or he can destroy everything.
That's a pretty cynical point of view. I've met plenty of charismatic people who wouldn't think they're spending "a lifetime practicing on people that one thinks are largely beneath one's self". And then I've meant charismatic people who are full of themselves as well. Charisma and egotism don't go hand in hand ...
Don't confuse charisma with extroversion. Being an open, warm, inviting person is not the defining characteristic of those who others readily identify as "charismatic" rather than a "really nice guy". Charisma is first and foremost about impressing others with your charm, intelligence, wit, etc. The skilled ones hide their contempt and egotism well.
Charismatic people are naturally drawn towards those they can impress. The easiest people to impress are those they can best. Charismatics don't hang around people who overshadow them.
Techies could easily game the system; but that's a boring game for boring people, and in the grand scheme of things does not matter. There are much more important things to spend time on.
My visceral reaction was that it was a huge generalization, but when I think about it more, I do have a difficult time thinking of people that are both charismatic and tech-savvy. The obvious example is Jobs, but even he wasn't the "tech" guy in a sense, we always associate that with Woz or others.
I guess for a lot of people here Musk is maybe an example of it? Is there some left/right brain separation that keeps techies from being charistmatic, is it a historical, cultural thing?
Or is it just a stereotype after all? :) It seems like a fascinating topic, though.
> Is there some left/right brain separation that keeps techies from being charistmatic
Nah. It's just that most techies are too busy doing brain things to learn soft skills like how to interact with people.
— a guy who struggled with being pretty awkward in high school, worked hard at socializing for a few years, and now does very well with business meetings / networking / parties even though he'd prefer to be delivering code
P.S.: "So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular."
my own charisma is inversely proportional to the hours I spend each day coding. more coding -> less charisma. so I don't think it is just a stereotype at all, but rather an emergent phenomenon of how we spend our time, and where our interests lead us.
It must suck to be a techy and have social skills because you'll get pegged as a business gal/guy even if you can hack with the best of em. Most people can't seem to handle the doublethink of two seemingly contradictory capabilities in one person. They need to find a simple job to reduce you to.
Most people just never saw one of them. People with really good social skills and really good hacking are rare unicorns. So, if people see one they get suspicious and start looking harder.
"Cannot be ... I NEVER met someone before who was like that. Let's poke around a bit more, I'm sure I'll find the flaw."
Funnily enough, you don't need to be a brilliant person to manage a 1920s grocery store. You need someone who's reliable, honest, and good at keeping minimum wage workers reliable and honest.
some of the most brilliant hackers i know are rightfully afraid of going into business with the kind of "brilliant men" described in this article.
just as non-technical founders benefit from learning to code for a myriad of reasons, hackers should do careful due diligence on a potential business partner. ask questions. require them to invest in the relationship. blow away the smoke and mirrors if you see their evidence, until you see that person in a humble light.
most of the time, this kind of salesperson is masking deep personality flaws which you can actually live with in exchange for the benefits, on one condition: the existence of abiding integrity.
so many of these relationships are predatory but they don't have to be if you find ways to get them to show you their character. see how they treat their friends. travel with them. build something together.
something a friend taught me is "H.A.L.T." = hungry, angry, lonely, tired. 1) don't make decisions when you're in any of these states; 2) it applies to choosing a business partner but here, you WANT to see them this way. you can learn a lot about a person when their basic needs are momentarily threatened, including how they treat you and others. so don't be dazzled, find them in a humble light because that's where a person's character is revealed.
the ones you want are comfortable with their humility.
I think HALT is also useful for introspection. Sometimes you are forced to function and make decisions in this state and you can learn a lot about yourself when this happens.
You can do this through work but it is probably better outside of that, through some sort of pastime that you can make difficult. Mountains, climbing and cycling are what I think of but there are many ways to induce HALT.
Intentionally push yourself out of your comfort zone every now and then and you learn a lot about your personal limits and your character. If you can't get on with yourself in a HALT state then how is anyone else going to?
right. the best long-term relationships have gone through stages of HALT, which is nothing more than exposing one's vulnerability.
that's where a person's character resides. and people who manage to be honest, and generous and courageous in those moments, are the ones to surround yourself with. experience character-building through HALT, in spite of it, and you're on your way to being a better man or woman, i suspect.
I love the fact that the author makes his points without ever putting down the men he talks about or sounding cynical. That make me take him more seriously than I otherwise would.
"The continual use of slang expressions is an evidence of mental laziness, and I will not hire a man who depends upon slang to express his meaning. It is a substitute for exact thinking."
I found this to be an unusual warning. Is "proper speech" really just a proxy for class in that time period? I'm now very curious about 1920s slang, especially its frequency of use in business settings.
Compare the comments on this site with the ones you see on reddit, where a sarcastic one-liner or a good meme reference can get thousands of upvotes. From my experience of actually writing comments on reddit that have gotten thousands of points - the less thought you put into them the better they'll do. The same is not true on HN where long and well thought out comments do better, and one-liners often get moderated. In my opinion, HN comments are much more valuable as a whole because of that.
I must be in the lower echelons of this secret HN club, because I cannot see the score on any comment. I thought it was the general and public absences of meaningless internet points that kept the comment system of HN in check.
Slang is slang. It was then, it is now, and it should be easy to understand his meaning. Besides, this man professedly runs a grocery store and says his best hires were muscly delivery boys (rather than college students). So I quite doubt he is being elitist and hiring only those of high class.
It's a conscious decision to appear different than the blue collar folks.
The point stands though. Slang is often used as an attention grabber or distractor. Like a comedian who curses a lot to shock you, which conceals that he doesn't really have anything to say.
Ugh - everyone speaking extremely carefully, making sure to use language like they would a math proof, makes for a very boring world. Just get the fucking point across; that's effective communication. Slang can be VERY good at fulfilling that.
I read slang also as linguistics crutches, like saying "cut to the chase" when you really meant to say "please speak plainly", which itself is a nice version of "just tell me the truth".
Linguistics are an interesting thing, especially with geeks. Often, their analytical minds concoct elaborate sentences, which, like algorithms, are abstractions over many little things. I prefer the plain talker, the man who has seen the cathedral of long sentences and has realized only the priests understand him.
Good writing and ok advice for someone who wants to run a grocery business. But it is absolutely untrue that "brilliant" men cannot also be careful, detail-oriented and have good business sense and skills. And certainly innovation and risk taking can be just as critical in business as following proven formulas and paying close attention to the bottom line. It depends on the business and circumstance. Overall I think in the context of high technology, the article is dated.
While this article can be seen as dated in regards to the definition of success that the author posits (making himself and 20 men rich by the standards of the locality), I think that the path the author lays out to achieving that success is still very relevant to this day.
The author was not denigrating "brilliant" men; instead he was explaining a type of "brilliant" person that focuses their energy on coming up with brilliant ideas, but will not stay focused long enough to see it through to finish. Imagine if you are reliant on a co-founder who wants to be pivot every 6 months simply because all of the challenges of the first brilliant idea are solved, and all that remains is the hard work and execution?
The outcome of that scenario would likely be the outcome he experienced in his first business venture with his college friend, "[Carroll] is a bad employer for himself, but he could put a lot of ginger into somebody else's business. . ."
I think the point he was trying to make was brilliant men arent exactly:
>careful, detail-oriented and have good business sense and skills.
He was referring to the brilliant man who dress flashy, go to the hottest clubs, befriend people in higher stature, and dont really contribute to goals. They just have flashy ideas and move on to the next without realizing the goals of the first idea.
I think you are interpretating the text a little too literally. I think the author is very much aware that the “brilliant” men he describes, are in fact only so in their own minds. The text is a cautionary tale that warns about being too impressed with someone just because they act self confidently.
His use of "brilliant" has little to do with IQ. It's a conflation of (a) creativity (which correlates, as he observes, with manic-depressive patterns and unreasonable expectations of others) and (b) superficial charisma (which correlates with narcissism and substance abuse). Those are two types of "flashiness" that he makes the mistake of conflating.
I'm category (a): creative, prone to mood swings, basically reliable but bad at the superficial reliability contests that determine advancement in most organizations. Yes, someone like me can be detail-oriented and show business acumen. We can be reliable. We're just not as competitive at being reliable (especially in the superficial ways, which are important in customer service) as others. If you need +3 sigma reliability-- someone who can work 100-hour weeks and not miss details or break rules or even become annoying-- you don't want +3 sigma creativity.
Does "+3 sigma creativity" actually mean anything?
(I'm aware enough of the rough technical definition, I mean in the sense that if you think there are 500,000 super special people in the U.S. can you do anything useful to find them?)
I was just using it ("+3 sigma") to mean "high-level" creativity and could have just as easily said "99.9th percentile" or some other number. No, I don't know of a good way to test for it.
My point is that there's a strong negative correlation, especially at the competitive upper reaches, between creativity and the sort os superficial reliability that (a) tends to determine a person's ability to advance in organizations, and (b) you'd probably want in someone you put in front of difficult clients on a regular basis.
"Brilliant" is so broad. Some people are brilliant in a particular subject; some are brilliant in the breadth of their knowledge; some of brilliant socially; some are brilliant analytically; etc.
I like the author's anecdotes and agree with some conclusions because I've run into people with the same personality traits. (We all probably have.) But Newton was both brilliant and stubborn as was Einstein. They didn't understand something in the physical world so they continued thinking about it until they were satisfied.
Human organizations need a balance of brilliance and plodders. I'd say they need many fewer brilliant people because it takes a large number of plodders to bring their ideas to fulfillment. But the brilliant people are looking to the future while the plodders are dealing with today.
You are saying your boss goes to the trouble to get a working prototype going and even does the UI fronted and when he asks you to finish and scale it out as an engineer (which is your job) you take offense to this request?
It doesn't really sound like the boss is providing a working prototype. It sounds like the boss provides throwaway code that is a step or two better than a screenshot or whiteboard drawing.
He's frustrated that his boss is basically doing the equivalent of, "I heard about NoSQL at a conference today, all our competitors are using it, please switch us from MySQL to NoSQL. It will be great"
(Then a week after the switch is done; "Have you heard about postgresql...?")
That's an interesting spin, especially in light of the way people talk about how "Romanized" many aspects of Christianity to increase it's adoption. However, I think you could also see Paul as a dedicated manager, frequently writing letters of encouragement and advice to all the churches.
Good point. Most of the protestant Christians in the contemporary United States should really call themselves "Paulistinians," or something similarly catchy and descriptive.
Also, at the time of it constituting 12 people, it wasn't a great organisation. That would come centuries, perhaps a millenia later. When it was only 12 strong, they didn't even have enough influence to make the local law look the other way.
Much of the ministry of Jesus occurred on the shores of Lake Galilee. In those days, there was a continuous ribbon development of settlements and villages around the lake and plenty of trade and ferrying by boat. The Synoptic gospels of Mark (1:14–20), Matthew (4:18–22), and Luke (5:1–11) describe how Jesus recruited four of his apostles from the shores of Lake Galilee: the fishermen Simon and his brother Andrew and the brothers John and James. One of Jesus' famous teaching episodes, the Sermon on the Mount, is supposed to have been given on a hill overlooking the lake. Many of his miracles are also said to have occurred here including his walking on water, calming the storm, the disciples and the boatload of fish, and his feeding five thousand people (in Tabgha).
People close to me used have told me on numerous occasions that I fall into the category of glib-talking, high-flying, never-finishing 'charmers' that the author mentioned in the prose.
It took me a while to understand that my going-off-on-tangents had nothing to do with impatience. It had more to do with me not realizing that the last mile is the hardest. I would start everything with gusto but as soon as I hit a road-block, I would dawdle and eventually lose interest as soon as something new came up.
I now decide a (feasible) finish line in my head before starting a new activity and consciously check myself whenever I feel like I'm about to give up on it. I force myself to look at the finish line until I re-convince myself that I need to cross it before I can even think of giving up.
I am not 'there' yet but I am beginning to see some results and that eggs me on further. :)
Start finishing things. It sounds trite but it's true. Some of the best advice I've ever been given is: the way you do anything is the way you do everything. So, finish the smallest tasks consistently and that will carry over to the bigger tasks.
I really need to work at this. I definitely have always fit the "genius but doesn't finish things" description. I've been working at this hard for 8 years because it really has negatively affected my life. I'm making some progress but it's really slow and if I slack off even a little I tend to lose everything.
Also, allow yourself some blow-out projects. You don't have to finish everything, but you want to become reliable. I.e. if you say you'll do something, then you'll do it.
The old expression "don't bite more than you can chew" epitomizes this. Don't start what you can't finish. It's in deciding what to start and what not to start that you'll make progress.
Read "The Effective Executive" by Peter Drucker, which addresses this in greater detail.
Thanks. I really need to either clear more stuff off my plate or sort out my work situation where I don't have post-workday burnout. Between my job, family commitments and working on my vehicle, I have trouble finding time to start anything now. I get a tremendous amount done when I'm not working.
I either have to settle with how things are now or change the work situation I think. I'll look into that book anyway.
I agree. It's more about developing good habits, so pick a small activity and see it through to the end. Bake a loaf of bread. Take out the garbage. Heck, even deciding you're going to do ten pushups and then doing them can help get you back in a finishing mindset.
I think the fundamental reason of not being finisher may come from several reasons: lack of detailed planning (oh, there's an unanticipated obstacle), lack of energy to finish things, and little barrier of attention shift.
I would say I am not a finisher, but what I am trying to do is reducing these reasons: trying to understand/plan better to the deepest level, sleeping/eating well, getting more satisfaction from finishing things than starting one, and doing smaller things, selectively.
You might want to try, if you haven't already, making public, specific, measurable commitments to have things done by a certain time. Give your word that you'll do something, in a concrete form that people can see failure or success on, to someone whose opinion really matters to you.
I've found that exercising that sort of honesty works very well for me. It's like, if you value your word, (which I do,) then you can leverage it back against yourself when you have to do something difficult.
Don't know if it works that way for everyone who values their word, but it might be worth a go. Might need some fine-running at the start, making tamer goals than you think you can achieve to prevent inadvertently breaking your word.
Depends on why you don't finish things. Often times, it's probably a mental attitude that's a road block.
If you quit when things get hard, maybe you need to realize that hard things are hard. Anything worth finishing will require you to bleed.
If you quit because you have to "feel like it" to work, you should work even when you don't feel like it. Hard things are hard, and nothing would ever get done if people did it only when they felt like it.
There are many reasons why people aren't finishers. You need to find out why, and then figure out similar people that have overcome it and the specific tactics they used to overcome it.
To add to that, this is how I get through the times when I don't "feel like it": I tell myself I'll just sit down and get something done. It doesn't have to be a lot, but I have to sit down and accomplish something. Even just chipping away at small pieces of a task can add up over time!
Take on smaller projects that you can feasibly finish. Finish them. Don't let yourself take on any more large projects until you've built up some track record of finishing small ones.
I teamed up with someone that keeps a very narrow focus to help prevent me wandering off track. Together we have kept very profitably focused for quite a few years now.
What if you aren't a finisher? How can you become one?
I wish I were as good at taking this advice as at giving it.
1. Lose the fear. (This is the root cause of all the other stuff.) Or, more
accurately, experience it but don't give in to it.
2. Timebox the work (as reasonably as one can) or limit "one more feature".
3. Fail fast, gracefully, and quietly. Learn when to *not* finish.
(You shouldn't be finishing *everything* you start. The problem is if
you finish *nothing*.)
4. Succeed decisively but simply (not ornately; don't aim for perfection).
Very good list, out of experience on some fields where I'm considered a talent or natural talent/smart by my peers but I feel like I fail to deliver more than 50% of the times, the first thing you need to do is:
0. Pick up your targets CAREFULLY.
Which means value your energy and time. Be afraid of starting something, stop doing or believing you can do many things at the same time while history clearly shows otherwise is a killer mistake.
Lower the bar, start achieving small things and then, just MAYBE, you should think of adding more.
For anyone struck by the modern relevancy of this piece I suggest you check out Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. It's also from the 1920s and the American culture that it describes (and critiques) is very similar to today.
True but only one company makes the new iPhone, many companies design enterprise software that need a simple workflow and a solid working database with reliable uptime.
Why? From all I have read about Newton, he would have been the employee from hell. A genius as a mathematician and physicist, yes; but a terrible employee.
He became Warden of the Royal Mint and became rather passionate about his new role - even to the extent of working as an undercover agent and personally leading the prosecution of "coiners" in court.
[NB For a fictionalized, but hugely entertaining, account of the relevant time in history I can recommend Neal Stephenson's wonderful "Baroque Cycle" - Newton is a major character.]
C'mon, who wouldn't want an employee who boils a watch and looks at the egg while contemplating the basic nature and equations that make up the physical sciences? ;)
I come from a HIGH IQ family. My father's IQ is unmeasurable but guesses are between 190-210 my move is over 165 and 3 of my sisters are in MENSA. I graduated Valedictorian in High School and College. I have been the "Jack of All Trades" and can study something and be proficient with it. Did some locally well known good deeds. From my 30+ years of work force experience I have decided that I wish I had an average IQ and that I got a B+ average.
My Conclusion: Perceived Intelligence is a curse. I try to hide my academic accomplishments and cringe when someone says I have some above average brain. Can't tell you how many times I hear, "The best _____ isn't necessarily the straight A student." "We don't higher straight A students."
People with a higher capacity intellectually can take in more information and see more moves ahead. That way there is a different perception on solution and it causes frustration for everyone.
> People with a higher capacity intellectually can take in more information and see more moves ahead. That way there is a different perception on solution and it causes frustration for everyone.
I have a different theory. Assuming that:
- High IQ individuals tend to rely less on intuition and more on analytical thinking. <insert reference>
- IQ measures analytical thinking rather then intuition. <insert reference>
- Intuition often outperforms analytical thinking in many complex domains that require fast decision making (I believe the book "Thinking fast and slow" explores this theme). This could also be evidenced by the seeming lack of correlation between "success" and IQ, past a certain IQ level.
Then it could be possible that individuals who consistently outperform higher IQ individuals in a given domain find it frustrating working with them. The analytical person might point out flaws in their reasoning and the intuitive person might not be able to rationally defend their position although they are right.
Disclaimer: As someone who is (probably) high IQ and often victim of "over analysis"[0], I might just be projecting my own experience here. But intuitively, I'd say my theory makes sense ;)
I never really thought about it that way, but after working in the game industry for ten years, I think you are absolutely correct.
Designing things to be "fun" is hard to do analytically. I'm a programmer, and I've observed programmers ruining game design by taking a designer's work and subjecting it to too much analysis. And the designers often can't defend their choices either.
I think you're right. There are two forces at work: innate ability and social acceptability. Innate ability tends to harm social acceptability. Therefore, to the extent that social acceptability determines a person's overall ability to succeed, high innate ability can actually pose a greater net detriment to success than a lower innate ability does. In a word, being "smart" or even "skillful" may in some cases make you less successful. The optimum, as you point out, is to have high innate ability but to disguise it in order to reduce the social downside. The trouble with this is that it's harder to disguise than it might seem: people tend to "sense" the intelligence of other people. You don't laugh at the right times. You tell jokes that no one gets. You think the big ra-ra push is crazy and you can't help saying so. The path that you find obviously correct is the one everyone else finds silly.
I'm convinced that the real solution, to the extent it's possible, is for highly intelligent people to find their way into positions that don't require social acceptance. Academics is obviously one destination (one log-jam, rather) for these types. But by all means avoid management, because that's where the attractiveness of your brilliance to employers and the unacceptability of your brilliance to your reports become a trap.
I think it's important to recognize that not all innate abilities are created equally. Innate intelligence will make you a social pariah but innate ability in a physical skill that results in you being an amazing basketball player will make you Michael Jordan.
I am a very social person so this might be strange but here is my career path so far.
Well I went from working IT at Age 13 - 17 (Sales and programing)
Artist and Art Restoration 17 - 20
Child Minister and Christian Camp Director 20 - 32
(LEAST FAVORITE JOB) RD and Systems Librarian at a College 32 - 37 (College as faculty is a very high drama environment)
(FAVORITE JOB) - Head Start Literacy Coach for 250 3-5 year olds.
All the places it was bad to be thought of as intelligent though Pre-School had the fewest consequences.
I appreciate the author's intentions, but I think the best outcomes happen when you hire brilliant men (and women) and manage them well.
In the case of the sales executive, it sounds like the author allowed his team to basically say "good luck doing this yourself, don't expect help from us." And he allowed the guy to move into an ivory tower far away from where things were happening.
If you decide you're moving in a certain direction, you need to make clear to the team, if necessary, that digging in their heels is not a response you're going to tolerate. Some people will probably have to move on.
I'm not surprised the article is anonymous. The owner sounds like a problem to me, as much as the "brilliant" sales executive. He's good at making a mediocre business, and his comfort zone is there. Trying to shake that up is a losing game for anyone, brilliant or otherwise.
Very dated perceptions. We know now, for example, that those who stammer and struggle for words often simply possess brains that are more full of information, rather than possessing less efficient or organized ones.
In a knowledge economy built on creativity, I'll take Different Thinkers over Cogs of Constancy any day.
He bends the meaning of words like 'brilliant' a bit and clearly lives in a time where there are no such thing as protected classes (e.g. medical) but there's a lot of value in remembering that most people develop wealth by managing risk, knowing our limits, and finishing what we start.
"But if you blunder for words, punctuate incorrectly, spell incorrectly, and express yourself clumsily, I'm sure to believe you mind is cluttered and ill-disciplined."
My mind is cluttered and I rely on spelling correction. Hard to say if I would get the position.
Since the article was written prior to the invention of automatic spelling correction, these sorts of seemingly trivial errors could tarnish one's first impression significantly. If you know nearly nothing about someone but need to form an opinion of them, you will use everything you do know to assess them, regardless of how trivial. Furthermore, you will generally be biased towards criteria that are more difficult to fake. It may not be fair but it's how humanity works, and being aware of this can help you greatly.
Confidence, intelligence, credentials, and experience can be faked or lied about. Comparing someone's written words with their speech, in person or over the phone, will give you a more reliable picture of how they think and communicate than anything else.
Reading this article is almost in perfect timing with my situation. I am 24 year old with only 2 years of college. I was learning more outside of school than in. Even though I might not be the best developer or maybe not even average, I took the jump in trying to make it. So far so good. With learning that experience is everything and know how to get help will take you far. I feel like I know twice as much as I did last year. Is it possible that a lot of us are trying to reach that feeling of accomplishment?
I most certainly pass this article on to friends and peers.
Do keep in mind that this letter (essay?) was written in an era when SMS wasn't a thing and getting an education involved (quite literally) crossing your t's and dotting your i's. A keyboard wasn't a thing yet and spell check was something witches and wizards did before their exams.
Things have gotten speedier, and yet, much lazier now - so much that we have begun to rely a fair bit on technology and a common shared understanding of the concepts that unite us into the communities we partake in. Add to that, the exchange of cultures via this great, big melting pot called the internet, and you get a hodge-podge of words, symbols and grammar that we end up loosely calling a language. As with all melting pots, the contents of this one have melded into each other so much that these changes to the contents have (again, literally) stuck!
TL;DR - It was different back then & it certainly is much different now. It really doesn't matter what words (or spellings) you choose; what matters is the thoughts you are trying to convey through your words (and spellings).
That's not what the author is saying. He's saying that if you are either unable or unwilling to correctly use "your" and "you're", you are probably unable or unwilling to pay attention to the details that matter to success in his business. I agree that there's a fine line between proper attention to detail and nitpicking, but taking the author's statement in context I don't think he's on the wrong side of it.
It depends on why I admired the people. If I admired them for their success in business, then yes, I would expect their writing to show attention to details like spelling. But if I admired them for something else, I wouldn't necessarily expect that. I'm certainly not saying that anyone who is worth admiring has to spell correctly.
Carmack is actually a hard worker and writes code. Too often in the tech industry you bump into people who are "architects" and "strategists" and not hands on at all, or what this article may refer to as a "genius".
that was fascinating. reminded me a bit of the protagonist in grossmith's "diary of a nobody", but without the petulant self-absorption masquerading as modesty. the author has genuinely sat down and thought long and deeply about who he is, what his strengths and limitations are, and how he can best work with other people, and he's a great writer to boot.
The modern business world is full of people like the author.
People who are asleep. People who are not actually alive. People who are threatened by those who think.
These people hate the thinker, but their dreary little lives rest directly on the foundation that the thinkers provide. For example, the radical who first looked at fire and thought, "hey, maybe I could use that".... now THAT GUY was a visionary who puts Musk to shame.
Really this type of people are just machines. And they will be the ones machines are easily able to replace.
I think there's decent advice here for CERTAIN TYPES OF BUSINESSES. But this is not universal good advice for all businesses.
The business in question, in this story, is a grocery store. It's a business with lots of competition and little innovation, where you're selling exclusively to customers who live very close to you. Furthermore, the fictional business owner isn't interested in taking the risks needed to build a massive chain, he's looking to grow slowly and make small, steady profits. For this business, there's no need for brilliance or big risks, you just need hard workers who are going to execute decently day in, day out.
A tech startup (the interest of most people on HN) is pretty much the complete opposite situation. You need brilliant programmers to build an excellent product. If you're B2C, you need those excellent salespeople who are going to dream big and go after massive deals. If you're B2B, you need great growth hackers/biz dev/marketers who can creatively get your product in front of massive numbers of people for minimal cost. When you're trying to grow from nothing to ginormous in 3-5 years, you simply can't do it with the slow grinding approach, the only way is with risk and brilliance. That doesn't mean there won't be grinding, repetitive tasks along the way, there will be TONNES, and you need people who will execute on them (not the pure "idea guys" with zero ability to execute, who I agree are of little use), but you also need to be dreaming big and taking big risks. Always going after small wins just doesn't work for tech startups, you need to regularly go after the big wins.
"But the point I have in mind is this: Business and life are built upon successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the most out of ordinary folks."
At a high level, I believe that's the essence of the story (whether is real or made-up).
Today, in a globalized world economy with saturated markets, we are lured into thinking that "the great next thing" will be a product of "brilliance". I think this is a good reminder that it's not. That in fact, on average, sustainable success is a product of a life's work and dedication to a purpose. That in fact, the Jobs, the Zuckerbergs and the Gates of the world are merely outliers and that we should look beyond the expectation of immediate and flamboyant returns.
> But if you blunder for words, punctuate incorrectly, spell incorrectly, and express yourself clumsily, I'm sure to believe you mind is cluttered and ill-disciplined.
I write and speak pretty well, but am still ill-disciplined as anything.
> You conceive a big idea, get the whole organization on tiptoes to carry it out, and then you lose interest and go off on a new tangent.
Now that's me.
> You are always living, in imagination, about six jumps ahead.
Now that's definitely me.
> Their active minds can always see two sides to every question; and they stand still while the debate goes on inside.
Now that's definitely me.
> Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do.
Good news, I am a genius.
Moral: In an ideal world I will never get hired or get success in business. Hell I am doomed for sure.
> My experience is that it pays to buy the best; and what applies to things applies equally to men.
This is true, but price is a poor indicator of how good something is. You need to understand the product or man, before you can judge which is the best.
Jealousy is a natural human emotion. It is notable how many stories bashing smart people (not for being smart per se, of course, but for lacking other important qualities) come up on HN. That, and how unfair the interview process is.
"That criticism may be justifiable, for I am mediocre. But the point I have in mind is this: Business and life are built upon successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the most out of ordinary folks."
The point of the article. Is this still true? I imagine you do need exceptional people to be able to hit the high notes (10x programmers and all that jazz).
Or am I interpreting this wrong, since the way he's using the word "brilliant" is a bit sarcastic, or at least archaic?
Most striking to me is how impossible such a direct conversation would be in this day and age. In a similar situation the manager would be pretty worried about HR/litigation possibilities.
"Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost
never do."
but gave no evidence.
Second, on finishing, we can consider I. Newton,
W. Mozart, C. Darwin ('Origin of the Species'), R.
Wagner (operas, especially 'The Ring'), J. Maxwell
(E&M), A. Einstein (general relativity), J.
Oppenheimer (A-bomb), S. Ulam (H-bomb), J. Salk
(polio vaccine), D. Henderson (Smallpox
eradication), J. Heifetz (violin), W. Gates
(Microsoft), A. Wiles (Fermat's last theorem), J.
Bezos (Amazon).
1. "There are just two grades of commodities in the world: the best -- and the others."
2. "...whether he can talk and write effectively... If you write and speak neatly and accurately, it is because your thinking is orderly; if your expression is forceful, the thought back of it must be forceful. But if you blunder for words, punctuate incorrectly, spell incorrectly, and express yourself clumsily, I'm sure to believe you mind is cluttered and ill-disciplined."
This story is a cheap attempt to make people with an inferiority complex feel good. There is nothing great about mediocrity. Someone who fails to deliver on their work is not brilliant, appearances to the contrary. But at the top of the world are brilliant people who have delivered, and no amount of self-congratulation for stolid mediocrity can change that.
The problem with the shoe buying story is that a lot of crap is sold as 'the best' and it can be very hard to tell the truth. Shoes are a great example. I used to buy Brasher walking shoes. They were great, but then they sold out and the shoes are now an inferior quality whilst the marketing is the same and the price if anything has gone up.
I've seen plenty of stupidly expensive shoes that are only expensive to trick people out of their money, not because they last for a long time. You need a way to judge other than "try it out for x years until it fails".
It doesn't seem fair to generalize everyone who is supposedly amazing at what they do as being poor workers. Seems like circumstantial evidence that might almost never be the case. Who really knows based on 1 person.
There's more than one example given in the article of a "brilliant" person who failed as a businessman. The author's opinion appears to be a considered one, based on multiple experiences, not a snap judgment based on one unfortunate episode.
Beware of following ancient advice—or you may get ancient practices.
"God Almighty, in fashioning his most useful men, often works slowly with quite common stuff. Now and then He turns out a quick job of superfine materials -- a genius who really delivers the goods. But most of His better grade line is ordinary in everything except the extra effort, and dogged determination, which have given it a finer texture and finish."
This tells me of a belief in the innate quality of man, of some who are simply born better than others. Surely only half the story. We know better today.
But I think the arguments are sound and clear-cut nonetheless. I believe the inadequacy of the argument to modern employment rests rather on importance of the set of skills that he willingly neglected: a more significant portion of jobs those days are very intensive on creativity and reliant on risky behavior associated with the former.
With a sound internal structure this risk can be controlled and isolated within organizations to get good results -- e.g. spawning research labs, creating "distributed labs" like Google, etc.
Being smart isn't good enough; you need to be able to finish what you've started. It's all about the execution and not the concept.
Furthermore, he's found he prefers to select hard workers and promote them up than to pick smart, ambitious kids from good families or good credentials. Hard work is better than sheer brilliance.
People who are driven by genius and passion never finish anything. This guy finds the best employees and businessmen are just average hard workers who pay attention to detail.
The big thing there, the part that resonated in my mind, was finish. I need to finish more things...
The person that started less 'brilliant', through finishing, can usurp the brilliance of the one that started strong. Intelligence is a gift and should be nurtured, not presumed on.
Counter point -- I usually read the comments before the articles themselves (personal preference). The tl;dr above made me go read the article. It is indeed great.
"The letters you brought spoke in the highest terms of your sales genius. The only question which they did not answer to my satisfaction was why companies which had valued you so highly should ever have allowed you to get away!"
This is a truth that holds today (in the form of things like LinkedIn Recommendations): Outside of exceptional circumstances, people seldom talk up the people they need the most, but they will talk up the people they wouldn't mind losing.
One of the things I find irksome about the business world (and this won't seem relevant to the OP till I explain it) is that, while it places a premium on "finishing" and "delivery" (by the way, if you use "deliver" intransitively I will punch you in the face) it also makes it really rare that one can finish anything. It claims to have a culture of "shipping" but employs these people called "executives" whose function is usually to get in the way of people trying to do so.
The disorganization of his "brilliant men" (which is a conflation of two types of people already-- the charismatic and the creative) seems to be something the corporate world (at least in 2014 technology) creates.
The "brilliant" just fall hardest, I'd argue, because highly creative people (one subtype he describes) tend to be most sensitive to context, and highly charismatic people (the other subtype) can usually assume the failure patterns of the highly creative.
The not-finishing culture, I think, is a product of the incoherency of the corporate world. It's not uncommon to see people pass years in Corporate America without achieving anything for reasons not their fault: shifting priorities, projects cancelled for stupid political reasons, "re-orgs", unclear direction.
At some point, people learn that Corporate Life is survived not by finishing (in fact, that can be harmful, because now you have support responsibilities) but being able to come up with a story when things outside your control stop you from finishing. The muddling effects of subordination compound this decline of executive function. It's rather sad, to tell the truth. I wish it weren't that way.
I don't think it's just "brilliant men" who fail, in this way, amid the jarring incoherency of most business. I think they just crash first and hardest. The rest tend to drift downward over time and underperform silently.
Yes, michaelochurch, you are correct that the shifting priorities of the work place often make finishing anything hard.
But there is another way, and that is to work in secret, and fit this secret work into natural breaks in your normal work. For example, part of my job is running a suite of reports on a monthly basis. Every time I run these reports I do a little work to make them easier/quicker to run next time. Over the space of a year this kind of work can really pay off, and frees up more time to do more satisfying work, but the key is to improve in secret, it's rarely appreciated at the time.
While I was reading this almost 100 year old article, I felt nervous and anxious because the writer actually [uncanny pictureI fear that I have never been able to finish any of my projects, I get to about 80% and I am completely burnt out and now I know why after reading this article. It doesn't take brilliance or hacker thinking to complete a project. Quite the opposite, resilience, boring and being consistent is what it takes to finish the remaining 20%. This I see as something I need to work on. I always thought that my quick thinking would get me far and it does give me speed and agility in thinking but my mistake was thinking this mentality needs to be for the entire project.
It makes sense now, marketing, sales, good software practices, these all take discipline, endurance and the need to apply yourself every single day. It's definitely not a sprint and I've built myself to sprint long distances and burning out at the last remaining mile.
If the wisdom is a 100 years old and it still strikes a chord with our modern business environment, it must be important.
Some people slack of laziness. Some of boredom. A brilliant guy needs a lot of infrastructure and support to not steer of course.
It is much easier for me to do 80 hour workload in 40 hours than 20 hour workload in the same 40. Probably I am not the only one. If I have even ounce of non challenging time at work I am always searching for the next great feature/framework/whatever. And shipping slips. I finally managed to find my stride but a few projects ... lets say they were hard on everyone.
Society places too much importance on the buds of ideas. True, an idea can change the world. But what gets lost in the shuffle is the fact that what truly matters is in those ideas being executed and turned into something tangible.
The charismatic idea men are a dime a dozen. I'm sure everyone here has worked with some hand-waving, smooth talking salesman who wows investors, then fail hard at meeting promises. It's those who can execute that are truly transformative.