7 ms·

Other than this article being from 1982 I didn't find alot interesting in it. There are only a couple of quotes from Michael Bloomberg and the article isn't re

Other than this article being from 1982 I didn't find alot interesting in it. There are only a couple of quotes from Michael Bloomberg and the article isn't really about him at all. I guess you could say that I learned that click bait headlines were a thing back in 1982:) In all seriousness....... I think the most interesting thing about Michael Bloomberg's success( 13th richest person in the world) is that successful people don't typically come from nowhere, but usually have a very strong track record of successes that predate the event or thing that others associate their success with. In his case he was: - an engineer from a good school, - then got an MBA from Harvard. - He was then a general partner at Salomon Brothers(the Google of wall street at the time). He then left with a $10 million buyout in 1981 dollars that he used to fund Bloomberg. Or put another way, I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be. There will always be outliers who finds a reason to turn his/her life around but almost all the successful people I know had an impressive track record of accomplishments before their big success happened. TL/DR success is rarely an overnight event. Most successful people build on an increasing track record of successful events before hitting their big success.

setpatchaddress 11y ago
Confirmation bias is certainly comforting.
- frandroid 11y ago
  Comfortation bias.
kelukelugames 11y ago
This is even more true in sports. How many NBA players were not the best player in their home town? Though might be less true for writers. Look at JK Rowling and Toni Morrison for example.
- wmeredith 11y ago
  If you want a real laugh Google highschool or college highlight reels of current NBA or NFL standouts. You usually end up with clips of monstrous kids single handedly wiping the floor with hopelessly outmatched opponents.
- Reedx 11y ago
  With professional sports or the olympics it's basically a hard requirement. Does anyone get into the NBA who didn't spend thousands of hours practicing basketball as a kid? Whereas you could write a successful book at any age and on your first try (although unlikely).
  - DrScump 11y ago
    "Does anyone get into the NBA who didn't spend thousands of hours practicing basketball as a kid?" Sure, if you're unusually tall or athletic. The Warriors' Festus Ezeli never played organized basketball of any kind until college. Manute Bol didn't start until his mid-teens.
    - aswanson 11y ago
      Ok. Let's narrow it down. Does anyone make it to the NBA at a position that requires something other than being able to run up and down the floor at a decent speed and be around 7 feet tall that didnt do so? A non-center position? Certainly no guard, small forward, or power forward I know of. And even those people you mentioned were/are non-exceptional backups or non-starters.
      - kelukelugames 11y ago
        I made the original post and I agree with you. I want to mention that two of the GOATs started at 15 because I think that is insane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Duncan#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Duncan#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakeem_Olajuwon#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakeem_Olajuwon#Early_life
ank_the_elder 11y ago
Not directly related to the article, but in case someone is interested, Salomon Brothers went through some brutal scandals before imploding. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Brothers#1990s_treasury_bond_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Brothers#1990s_treasur... Some of this is documented in the book "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis, who went on to write "Moneyball" and "The Big Short."
- sumedh 11y ago
  You can also read The snowball : Warren Buffett to get the view about the crisis from the top guy.
gmarx 11y ago
The most successful software entrepreneur I know (in monetary terms) had none of this. When I met him he was fresh out of the army and not as an officer. He did some web programming for us. The next thing he did was the classic bad idea of consulting his way to a product. A decade later he's worth north of 100 million dollars
- CyberDildonics 11y ago
  I think you're burying the lead, how did he make 100 million?
  - gmarx 11y ago
    I think it's "lede" but anyway I just didn't want to be too specific in case anyone felt like tracking him down. After the company we both worked for he went back home and was going to do some software projects on a consulting basis. He started working on administrative software for a guy who had a business at the periphery of the medical field. The guy who had the business suggested that the software he needed might be useful to other people in the business and got my friend to do the project for less money in exchange for the right to sell it as a product. That original customer also invested. I think one of the keys was that it wasn't a glamorous business and no one terribly sophisticated was working on software for it. From there I think it was old fashioned business, years of slogging and sales and incremental growth until his was the top provider in his region. Then he sold a large part of the company to a private equity firm. So it was a very not silicon valley story. As far as key lessons for people on this site I'd say it's not to focus on the standard silicon valley story. In a lot of ways he did everything that goes against the summmary wisdom of ycombinator hacker news. He didn't solve a problem that he had. He started solo. He consulted to product. He technically had a angel investor in his first customer. He never raised VC. He sold to private equity. He didn't do it in Silicon Valley. Also his tech skills weren't that impressive and his platform choice seemed laughable. I think the key is solving a real problem in an unglamorous little known business and sell and survive and grow.
- apapli 11y ago
  Curious - why is consulting your way to a product a bad idea, if you don't already have a product/market need validated?
wtvanhest 11y ago
> Or put another way, I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be. This is definitely wrong. Take almost any CEO and at 25 their careers are pretty close to pretty much every middle manager at any other big corp. There are of course outliers, but start with Tim Cook and just go down the list. By 35 most people have their trajectory starting to lock, but there are also many 35 year olds who's destiny is far from certain.
jsprogrammer 11y ago
Honestly, this argument appears to be a complete tautology (successful people are successful). Also, what is with the fatalism? >Or put another way, I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be. >There will always be outliers who finds a reason to turn his/her life around but almost all the successful people I know had an impressive track record of accomplishments before their big success happened. You likely know a tiny fraction of 'successful people'.
elcapitan 11y ago
In any society that has a strong bias towards inequality by inheritance, most people are already by the age of .. 15 who they will be (take smaller numbers to make it even more ridiculously obvious).
- adventured 11y ago
  That isn't very applicable to this example. The majority of the super rich in the US do not inherit their wealth and never have. The majority come from the middle or lower class. The US has a bias of inequality through wealth creation, with one of the highest median incomes to go with it.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
Archio 11y ago
> I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be If that's the case, I (25) think I'd rather get a bottle of whiskey and a handgun and end it now.
- aswanson 11y ago
  Don't do it brother...trust me, you're just getting started.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jqm 11y ago
  That "be who you are by 25" part of the comment is just silly. You don't have to burn the world down by 30, and outside of the tech industry very few do.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rifung 11y ago
Indeed I believe Richard Hamming addressed this in his talk "You and Your Research." In it he says, "The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest." I think the part about opportunity is probably the most applicable outside of research. If you go to a good school or have done a good job at work, then you're more likely to get promoted or given more responsibilities. And with more responsibility, you can show again that you can do a good job and thus get further responsibilities.
volaski 11y ago
"Track record" is just a byproduct of motivated/smart people trying hard at life. Also there's no such thing as "increasing track record of successful events". You probably perceive it as such because you only learn what the media/people want you to hear. A lot of successful people kept going and going even when there was no glimmer of hope just because they believed in what they were doing, and one day they had an "overnight success". In extreme cases they never even saw their own success in their lifetime (not that I am a fan of this phenomenon).
- kevan 11y ago
  > In extreme cases they never even saw their own success in their lifetime The fine arts are a prime example of this. Sometimes it can take decades for the world to decide how great or influential a person's work was.
crikli 11y ago
"I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be." Christ 40 year old me is glad this isn't true.
CPLX 11y ago
This whole post is basically ridiculous, and the reason is because there isn't any science in it: There's no attempt to balance it with a control group of people who are always successful but never attract any real notoriety, or people who are rarely successful but have a giant hit that catapults them forward, and there's no methodology for defining what these antecedent success markers actually are. This part however illustrates the biggest problem: > Most successful people build on an increasing track record of successful events before hitting their big success. Most people don't have "track records" until they are notable, at which point they have the ability to retrospectively define themselves however they please, since they most likely haven't been under journalistic surveillance the entire time.
- djhn 11y ago
  Applies especially (mostly) to folks pre-internet. I mean, what most people share about themselves (in)voluntarily nowadays is much more than journalistic surveillance would have yielded a decade ago. Of course, if your PR agency is good, and the journalist isn't adversarial, you can spin everything you did anyway you like.
princeb 11y ago
i think your friends, network and environment dictates the kind of success you have. the things you mentioned, going to good schools, getting into a career with plenty of successful people around you, begets that kind of success. but i also know a handful of folks with success that did not go to good schools or have great careers but achieved significant business success: an oil rig machine parts manufacturer, a fabric mill owner, a latex manufacturer, a luxury furniture reseller, that have achieved success because their friends and networks are the kind of guys who will keep having goes at different businesses and products until something sticks. most of these businesses aren't cutting edge technology but there is a lot of value in unifying supply chains that are still very dependent on trust and know-whos, as well as having a bit of edge in the business negotiation process. their success had little to do with which schools they went to, only that they surrounded themselves with other people who made business their focus.
throwaway2048 11y ago
those successes and good fortunes typically stretch back way into childhood and have a lot to do with parental situation/wealth as well.
rz2k 11y ago
Though any good university may have filled the same role for an exceptionally bright an enterprising person with a modest background, Bloomberg is know to specifically credit Johns Hopkins as almost a beginning of his life completely different from what he had known before. This NYT article goes into more depth about its transformative role, his later significant donations, and how he valued rigorous social science research when mayor. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/nyregion/at-1-1-billion-bloomberg-is-top-university-donor-in-us.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/nyregion/at-1-1-billion-bl...
WalterBright 11y ago
> by 25 you are who you will be Check out Ray Kroc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kroc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kroc Colonel Sanders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders

setpatchaddress 11y ago

Confirmation bias is certainly comforting.

frandroid 11y ago
Comfortation bias.

kelukelugames 11y ago

This is even more true in sports. How many NBA players were not the best player in their home town? Though might be less true for writers. Look at JK Rowling and Toni Morrison for example.

wmeredith 11y ago
If you want a real laugh Google highschool or college highlight reels of current NBA or NFL standouts. You usually end up with clips of monstrous kids single handedly wiping the floor with hopelessly outmatched opponents.
Reedx 11y ago
With professional sports or the olympics it's basically a hard requirement. Does anyone get into the NBA who didn't spend thousands of hours practicing basketball as a kid? Whereas you could write a successful book at any age and on your first try (although unlikely).
- DrScump 11y ago
  "Does anyone get into the NBA who didn't spend thousands of hours practicing basketball as a kid?" Sure, if you're unusually tall or athletic. The Warriors' Festus Ezeli never played organized basketball of any kind until college. Manute Bol didn't start until his mid-teens.
  - aswanson 11y ago
    Ok. Let's narrow it down. Does anyone make it to the NBA at a position that requires something other than being able to run up and down the floor at a decent speed and be around 7 feet tall that didnt do so? A non-center position? Certainly no guard, small forward, or power forward I know of. And even those people you mentioned were/are non-exceptional backups or non-starters.
    - kelukelugames 11y ago
      I made the original post and I agree with you. I want to mention that two of the GOATs started at 15 because I think that is insane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Duncan#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Duncan#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakeem_Olajuwon#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakeem_Olajuwon#Early_life

ank_the_elder 11y ago

Not directly related to the article, but in case someone is interested, Salomon Brothers went through some brutal scandals before imploding. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Brothers#1990s_treasury_bond_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Brothers#1990s_treasur... Some of this is documented in the book "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis, who went on to write "Moneyball" and "The Big Short."

sumedh 11y ago
You can also read The snowball : Warren Buffett to get the view about the crisis from the top guy.

gmarx 11y ago

The most successful software entrepreneur I know (in monetary terms) had none of this. When I met him he was fresh out of the army and not as an officer. He did some web programming for us. The next thing he did was the classic bad idea of consulting his way to a product. A decade later he's worth north of 100 million dollars

CyberDildonics 11y ago
I think you're burying the lead, how did he make 100 million?
- gmarx 11y ago
  I think it's "lede" but anyway I just didn't want to be too specific in case anyone felt like tracking him down. After the company we both worked for he went back home and was going to do some software projects on a consulting basis. He started working on administrative software for a guy who had a business at the periphery of the medical field. The guy who had the business suggested that the software he needed might be useful to other people in the business and got my friend to do the project for less money in exchange for the right to sell it as a product. That original customer also invested. I think one of the keys was that it wasn't a glamorous business and no one terribly sophisticated was working on software for it. From there I think it was old fashioned business, years of slogging and sales and incremental growth until his was the top provider in his region. Then he sold a large part of the company to a private equity firm. So it was a very not silicon valley story. As far as key lessons for people on this site I'd say it's not to focus on the standard silicon valley story. In a lot of ways he did everything that goes against the summmary wisdom of ycombinator hacker news. He didn't solve a problem that he had. He started solo. He consulted to product. He technically had a angel investor in his first customer. He never raised VC. He sold to private equity. He didn't do it in Silicon Valley. Also his tech skills weren't that impressive and his platform choice seemed laughable. I think the key is solving a real problem in an unglamorous little known business and sell and survive and grow.
apapli 11y ago
Curious - why is consulting your way to a product a bad idea, if you don't already have a product/market need validated?

wtvanhest 11y ago

> Or put another way, I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be. This is definitely wrong. Take almost any CEO and at 25 their careers are pretty close to pretty much every middle manager at any other big corp. There are of course outliers, but start with Tim Cook and just go down the list. By 35 most people have their trajectory starting to lock, but there are also many 35 year olds who's destiny is far from certain.

jsprogrammer 11y ago

Honestly, this argument appears to be a complete tautology (successful people are successful). Also, what is with the fatalism? >Or put another way, I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be. >There will always be outliers who finds a reason to turn his/her life around but almost all the successful people I know had an impressive track record of accomplishments before their big success happened. You likely know a tiny fraction of 'successful people'.

elcapitan 11y ago

In any society that has a strong bias towards inequality by inheritance, most people are already by the age of .. 15 who they will be (take smaller numbers to make it even more ridiculously obvious).

adventured 11y ago
That isn't very applicable to this example. The majority of the super rich in the US do not inherit their wealth and never have. The majority come from the middle or lower class. The US has a bias of inequality through wealth creation, with one of the highest median incomes to go with it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

Archio 11y ago

> I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be If that's the case, I (25) think I'd rather get a bottle of whiskey and a handgun and end it now.

aswanson 11y ago
Don't do it brother...trust me, you're just getting started.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jqm 11y ago
That "be who you are by 25" part of the comment is just silly. You don't have to burn the world down by 30, and outside of the tech industry very few do.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rifung 11y ago

Indeed I believe Richard Hamming addressed this in his talk "You and Your Research." In it he says, "The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest." I think the part about opportunity is probably the most applicable outside of research. If you go to a good school or have done a good job at work, then you're more likely to get promoted or given more responsibilities. And with more responsibility, you can show again that you can do a good job and thus get further responsibilities.

volaski 11y ago

"Track record" is just a byproduct of motivated/smart people trying hard at life. Also there's no such thing as "increasing track record of successful events". You probably perceive it as such because you only learn what the media/people want you to hear. A lot of successful people kept going and going even when there was no glimmer of hope just because they believed in what they were doing, and one day they had an "overnight success". In extreme cases they never even saw their own success in their lifetime (not that I am a fan of this phenomenon).

kevan 11y ago
> In extreme cases they never even saw their own success in their lifetime The fine arts are a prime example of this. Sometimes it can take decades for the world to decide how great or influential a person's work was.

crikli 11y ago

"I've always felt that by 25 you are who you will be." Christ 40 year old me is glad this isn't true.

CPLX 11y ago

This whole post is basically ridiculous, and the reason is because there isn't any science in it: There's no attempt to balance it with a control group of people who are always successful but never attract any real notoriety, or people who are rarely successful but have a giant hit that catapults them forward, and there's no methodology for defining what these antecedent success markers actually are. This part however illustrates the biggest problem: > Most successful people build on an increasing track record of successful events before hitting their big success. Most people don't have "track records" until they are notable, at which point they have the ability to retrospectively define themselves however they please, since they most likely haven't been under journalistic surveillance the entire time.

djhn 11y ago
Applies especially (mostly) to folks pre-internet. I mean, what most people share about themselves (in)voluntarily nowadays is much more than journalistic surveillance would have yielded a decade ago. Of course, if your PR agency is good, and the journalist isn't adversarial, you can spin everything you did anyway you like.

princeb 11y ago

i think your friends, network and environment dictates the kind of success you have. the things you mentioned, going to good schools, getting into a career with plenty of successful people around you, begets that kind of success. but i also know a handful of folks with success that did not go to good schools or have great careers but achieved significant business success: an oil rig machine parts manufacturer, a fabric mill owner, a latex manufacturer, a luxury furniture reseller, that have achieved success because their friends and networks are the kind of guys who will keep having goes at different businesses and products until something sticks. most of these businesses aren't cutting edge technology but there is a lot of value in unifying supply chains that are still very dependent on trust and know-whos, as well as having a bit of edge in the business negotiation process. their success had little to do with which schools they went to, only that they surrounded themselves with other people who made business their focus.

throwaway2048 11y ago

those successes and good fortunes typically stretch back way into childhood and have a lot to do with parental situation/wealth as well.

rz2k 11y ago

Though any good university may have filled the same role for an exceptionally bright an enterprising person with a modest background, Bloomberg is know to specifically credit Johns Hopkins as almost a beginning of his life completely different from what he had known before. This NYT article goes into more depth about its transformative role, his later significant donations, and how he valued rigorous social science research when mayor. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/nyregion/at-1-1-billion-bloomberg-is-top-university-donor-in-us.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/nyregion/at-1-1-billion-bl...

WalterBright 11y ago

> by 25 you are who you will be Check out Ray Kroc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kroc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kroc Colonel Sanders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders