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One thing that the author focuses on is trying to predict what will be big in the medium to longer time horizon and preparing oneself to be competent in that wh
by mswen 11y ago
One thing that the author focuses on is trying to predict what will be big in the medium to longer time horizon and preparing oneself to be competent in that while few others realize that "it" even exists.
I am a bit older than the author and have had some experience with this strategy. One specific example is creating an approach to latent semantic analysis that worked really well back in 2000. My partner and I couldn't get people with money to pay attention. We ended up putting it on the shelf and moving on. Around 2007 semantic gets really hot with VCs but we are each engaged elsewhere.
My point is that this strategy can suffer from being too early. You may eventually be shown to be right but you were too early or not persuasive enough to gain the benefit from the insight and work.
Still, I find myself much more intrigued with creating something new, or exploring the leading edge of some field than just grinding out the next iteration of the same old thing.
Maybe one day I will get the timing just right.
- bane 11y agoThis is really insightful, there's a pretty large library of algorithms and approaches that have been sitting on the shelf for decades (or used in very few places) that become far more interesting with modern hardware. The recent resurgence with Bloom filters for example, a technology form the 1970s, used in a few database products, is now everywhere. But there's also the curious problem of expensive and difficult to produce technology that doesn't have a market large enough to sustain it. Example, the crop of now dead or dying enterprise entity extraction companies. It turns out it's expensive to build those systems, but the market isn't that large, which forces the price up to try and survive, which then further reduces the market and so on into a death spiral. Nowadays people just try to get by with OpenNLP...which was easily bested by tools like ThingFinder and ClearForest a decade earlier.
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoThe bloom filter thing is interesting - it was just useful enough to stay occasionally used, till what a decade ago when simple lookup needs exploded around key-value stores. But I would suggest the "occasionally used" is as much a signal as anything - I'm wondering how to discover that signal.
- aristus 11y agoWith LSA, I believe it suddenly became hot in 2007 because the belcor patent was set to expire.
- zeveb 11y ago> With LSA, I believe it suddenly became hot in 2007 because the belcor patent was set to expire. Which has interesting implications about the extent to which patents help or hinder innovation…
- drblast 11y agoYoung people tend to severely underestimate how much luck and timing play into success. When I read, "When I was in 9th grade...and Googled..." I realized why the article sounded like it did.
- minikites 11y agoI had an identical reaction. I'd like to think I'm above simple agism but someone who is 29-31 years old dropping life lessons seems hollow.
- rawnlq 11y agoI was curious about his background and started googling him: http://www.jameskoppel.com/bio.html http://www.jameskoppel.com/bio.html. He was a Thiel fellow in 2012 so he was less than 20 yrs old then. He is at most 23 yrs old now.
- tbrownaw 11y agoI saw some discussion about corporate onboarding recently, apparently the best person to help the new hire get onboarded is the person who was most recently onboarded themselves. Maybe something similar applies to adult (or almost-adult) life?
- vanattab 11y agoI don't think so. The reason a recent hire is well suited to onboarding a new hire is because process of onboarding is very dynamic and changing and its a one time or at least rare thing in the life of an employee. The onboarding process the new employee is going to go through is likely completely different from what a employee might have gone through 15 years ago but is probably almost identical to want someone hired 15 days ago went through. It seems silly to me to compare who is best at providing help to complete a single, short, well defined task to who may be best at advising how to live a happy productive adult life. How could a fresh 18 year old adult possible give advice on how to balance your work and family life? Edit: Now if you were to narrow the question to: What age of adviser is best for assisting a young high school grad with their transition to college life such a comparison might be more meaningful.
- joe_the_user 11y agoYeah, Unique technical skills generally aren't a great path to riches. The most uniquely skilled people in the world might be famous but they often aren't rich or at least not extremely rich. Some combination of knowing what people want, being able to (directly or indirectly) organize people to create the thing, and knowing rich people willing to invest in your plan for doing it, is pretty the formula for most people gaining wealth in this society. There are other formulas but this is by far the most common and why fight the average if you're after success?