5 ms·

How old were you when you decided to start giving up?

128 points by nate 17y ago

ryanwaggoner 17y ago
This is fantastic advice for people who want to learn the new things that they need to learn. However, not everyone does, and that's perfectly OK. I know we're biased towards programming here, but let's flip your example around: I know how to code, but I don't know how to do enterprise sales. Yes, it behooves me to learn something about it, but if I can hire someone to do it for me, why shouldn't I? My goal is to always hire people smarter and more competent than myself at the thing that I'm hiring them to do. I don't need to be the best at everything; I'd much rather be the best at what I'm best at :)
- nate 17y ago
  Right, as long as you have the money to hire someone to do enterprise sales, great. I'm all for hiring people smarter than me and to do things I don't want to do. But most people starting a new project don't have money to do those hires. Look at Paul Graham. When they started viaweb, Paul had to play sales guy. I believe he mentions in at least one essay, that it's not like sales was something he was chomping at the bit to go and do. But a fledging company can't go out and hire sales guys, so he stepped up and learned how to sell his product, and realized he was actually pretty good at it. So this advice is to all those out there with no money who are stuck waiting for someone else to make their dreams come true. That's a no good place to be, and I refuse to be in it.
  - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
    Being relentlessly resourceful doesn't always mean "do it myself". Sometimes it means you go get funding, sometimes it means finding someone to work for equity or revenue share, sometimes it means figuring out how to make money somewhere else until you afford to pay someone to do X.
  - gridspy 17y ago
    I've actually found it surprisingly easy to sell our product. When you make "Something that people want"(tm) it just sells itself. You just stand to one side and point out that they want it.
charlesju 17y ago
I couldn't agree with the author more. The primary skill of a successful entrepreneur is the relentless ambition to just do it. Subsequently, after trashing my alma mater for the majority of my college career, I've come to realize that the biggest lesson I learned in life was through there. Which is of course the lesson on how to learn stuff that is really hard, but necessary to accomplish a goal.
- nate 17y ago
  I hear ya. I'm on the fence when it comes to Jason Fried's advice about dropping out of college. He's a big fan of convincing people to quit and start working, at least in the software industry. I went to school as a chemical engineer, and though often it seems the education's specifics are a waste to me, I learned how to approach problems rigorously and, in your words, relentlessly. I'm not sure I'd have that same drive if I wasn't challenged like that from the teachers and the education.
ww520 17y ago
If you know the stuff, do it yourself. If you don't know it, hire someone else to do it. If you don't have money, well, you find a cofounder.
byrneseyeview 17y ago
Determination is a good thing, but determination without direction is not. If you're good at design, and bad at programming, why insist on doing the programming yourself? A designer-programmer team will almost certainly kick your ass. If you have a particular skill that seems to be part of a generalized skill set (for example, if you're good at meeting new people, you're likely to be good at sales), you can test it. If you know that you're bad at math, bad at logic, bad at working on one task for more than a few minutes at a time, and bad at spotting your own mistakes, you might not want to try programming (or architecture) just to prove to yourself that you have the willpower to overcome your character traits.
- nate 17y ago
  Yep, and that's why I think it's still a great idea to partner with people who are good at those skills. But if you are stuck at the finding a partner phase because you don't have friends with those skills and don't have any money, why get stuck? Just going through the motion of learning something you don't even want to learn is likely going to put you into circles of people WHO DO HAVE the passion in doing those things. I've met dozens of people stuck at that finding someone else phase. Maybe they should look at it with a Zen attitude "to find a partner, become independent". I think many people dating and looking for others recognize that already. Needy/desperate people have a hard time finding those people they need and are desperate to meet :) So make yourself independent and those relationships will come easier.
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    I think you're looking at binary choices: give up, or forge ahead. Whereas I tend to see it as a question of picking among infinitely many desirable options. In that case, optimizing based on what you're best at is essential. That actually answers the Zen question, too: don't become independent by learning how to solve every problem, but by getting into a situation in which the problems you're faced with are the ones you're best at solving.
- jrwoodruff 17y ago
  I actually had this exact problem. I started out in print design - newspapers to be exact - 5 years ago. About 3 years ago I realized a lot of the ideas I had and wanted to pursue needed a web developer, and a web designer. But I was surrounded by copy editors and press guys (not that there's anything wrong with that...) So I learned Flash. Programmed some terrible, which-button-did-I-attach-that-code-to games, then took a programming class at the community college. Learned about loops, and iteration and general object-oriented theory. I made better flash programs and built a portfolio that got me a job building websites. After which I learned how to actually build a web site using CSS and XHTML instead of flash. Now, I'm surrounded by web developers, DBAs and generally tech-savvy folks, and I'm building one of my ideas with a very talented java-programming co-worker. It's taken longer than I wanted, but I'm still learning, and it's insanely rewarding, even if our product ends up being a complete bust. I'll never stop learning and trying new things, even if I'm not so good at them. It opens doors and creates opportunity.
tptacek 17y ago
Is Inkling using market scoring rules for liquidity? I've been wondering about that for awhile, and the Hanson reference makes me wonder more. (The LMSR is the only way I've managed to get a market work; I'm still totally stuck in automated market makers).
- yankeeracer73 17y ago
  Yes, it uses Hanson's market scoring rule.
  - akkartik 17y ago
    That's the same Robin Hanson I've been reading at overcomingbias and lesswrong. I wasn't aware of his work on prediction markets. Most interesting.
coffeemug 17y ago
I would argue that the only skill a business owner really needs is the skill to identify, hire, and lead talent. Everything else is probably secondary. If you're not good at programming, learning to program in order to do it yourself is ridiculous advice - unless you spend ten years learning full time, you'll end up with a mediocre product. Delegation works. Just do it.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Yes, If someone happens to have programming skill, it might expand into the skill of knowing which programmer to hire. But the skills the parent identifies are inherently the core skills - anyone growing in business would want to gain them and leave their other skills by the way side (you aren't going to run your business like a twelve year doing his homework, are you?). Of course, I'd prefer not to live in the world of pure delegation so I'd rather go with being hired by someone with these skills. Oddly enough, the best managers of programmers actually don't jump in and program themselves!
- vorador 17y ago
  How do you identify a good programmer if you don't know programming ?
  - dschobel 17y ago
    A track record of producing good products would be my instinctive answer were I a non-technical person. But since I'm a technical person, I'd ask them why manhole covers are round.
    - jderick 17y ago
      And hope they laugh and refer to Feynman
  - coffeemug 17y ago
    It's not immediately clear to me that technical people are any better at identifying good programmers than non-technical ones.
tron_carter 17y ago
This was an inspiring article for someone like me with an business degree and aspirations for creating a startup but without the programming ability. Would starting out learning a language like python be recommended as a good one in general for putting an idea into action? After some iteration and traction, I'd bring on a capable coding partner to do it right. FWIW, I've also heard that Python is useful for making scripts for automating tasks or improving productivity.
- aero142 17y ago
  Yes. Python is a great learning language, and useful for many things long term.
- jedc 17y ago
  Python is great. O'Reilly is coming out with a book soon, "Head First Programming" that teaches programming, specifically using Python. It could be a great first start for you.
- davidw 17y ago
  Python and Ruby are great first languages; they'll let you do all kinds of things, from quick scripts to web programming to GUI's. There are some things for which they're not ideal, but they're still probably 'good enough'.
- notauser 17y ago
  This route (learn to code it yourself) is the one I took. I now have a pretty technically credible* product with actual paying customers and everything. The language I learned first was JavaScript because it's ubiquitous. There are a million tutorials to get you going. A lot of JS tutorials suck, which is a disadvantage, but it gives you a pretty big confidence boost to be able to read a tutorial and think "that's moronic, I know 6 other ways to do that which will work better". Python tutorials tend to break out advanced/elegant/clever stuff really quickly which has the opposite effect. I wrote a couple of little apps, then a prototype, then it felt like I knew enough to really get going. I then picked up Python (actually Django) because the relative maturity of server side JS platforms isn't as good. Switching languages was easy. The total time to get to that point was about 4 months (whilst working full time), but I had the advantage of living in a place where everything shut when it went dark at 7pm. *Except for the bugs, and the scaling issues, and the bad design decisions I made early on. As far as I can tell I'm not the only person to have problems like this though, and refactoring is a good way to spend a plane ride.
tpyo 17y ago
I was expecting something completely different by the title. I was thinking of how, when you grow older, your curiosity dies because it takes too much effort to satisfy it. This worries me. I have a friend who was saying the same thing, but he was uninterested in doing anything about it.
- drhodes 17y ago
  I think curiosity dies out for two reasons. The first is plain ol' brain chemistry. Secondly, when people get older and they sit down at a computer, they do so to get stuff done. When a kid sits down at a machine they explore without expectation of themselves. Adults have the expectation that - what they want to get done - will get done - and in a reasonable amount of time. However, some things do take more than a "reasonable amount of time", and frustration mounts because of this expectation. Soon, learning new things becomes associated with frustration. So relax a little, and explore a lot. Then read the docs. Or read the docs - and then explore. Just don't expect to be productive in the New-Software-Product in 2 hours.
nihilocrat 17y ago
"I have this great idea for a *video game*, I just need someone to build it. How do I find a *coder* and build this *video game* in a couple months?". This happens so often on gamedev-related forums it's depressing. Pure beginners often lack the gumption, or perhaps just the knowledge, to realize that they could and usually should just do everything themselves, or at least learn how to code a game or use a game making application. In these days of 200-person AAA development teams I can understand the sentiment that developers by nature are super-specialized, and that having multiple skillsets just doesn't compute.
joelhaus 17y ago
The bottom-line in this article is that you need to take the steps necessary to get a project done. Even if this means self-educating, don't let that prevent you from accomplishing your goals. In reality, this isn't always feasible. That's why it's so important to have good judgment about these things. It reminds me of this quote: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. - Reinhold Niebuhr [UPDATED] This isn't meant to be a religious statement, I'm just crediting the original. You can just as easily replace "god" with "imagination" or "consciousness" or whatever if that makes it more palatable.
hyperbovine 17y ago
The analogy at the top is flawed. The 7-year old has zero opportunity cost. His time is worthless. If you have a great idea, but also the burden of supporting a family, holding down a day job, or whatever, hiring somebody to build your idea might make good sense.
wendroid 17y ago
18

128 points by nate 17y ago

This is fantastic advice for people who want to learn the new things that they need to learn. However, not everyone does, and that's perfectly OK. I know we're biased towards programming here, but let's flip your example around: I know how to code, but I don't know how to do enterprise sales. Yes, it behooves me to learn something about it, but if I can hire someone to do it for me, why shouldn't I? My goal is to always hire people smarter and more competent than myself at the thing that I'm hiring them to do. I don't need to be the best at everything; I'd much rather be the best at what I'm best at :)

nate 17y ago
Right, as long as you have the money to hire someone to do enterprise sales, great. I'm all for hiring people smarter than me and to do things I don't want to do. But most people starting a new project don't have money to do those hires. Look at Paul Graham. When they started viaweb, Paul had to play sales guy. I believe he mentions in at least one essay, that it's not like sales was something he was chomping at the bit to go and do. But a fledging company can't go out and hire sales guys, so he stepped up and learned how to sell his product, and realized he was actually pretty good at it. So this advice is to all those out there with no money who are stuck waiting for someone else to make their dreams come true. That's a no good place to be, and I refuse to be in it.
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  Being relentlessly resourceful doesn't always mean "do it myself". Sometimes it means you go get funding, sometimes it means finding someone to work for equity or revenue share, sometimes it means figuring out how to make money somewhere else until you afford to pay someone to do X.
- gridspy 17y ago
  I've actually found it surprisingly easy to sell our product. When you make "Something that people want"(tm) it just sells itself. You just stand to one side and point out that they want it.

charlesju 17y ago

I couldn't agree with the author more. The primary skill of a successful entrepreneur is the relentless ambition to just do it. Subsequently, after trashing my alma mater for the majority of my college career, I've come to realize that the biggest lesson I learned in life was through there. Which is of course the lesson on how to learn stuff that is really hard, but necessary to accomplish a goal.

nate 17y ago
I hear ya. I'm on the fence when it comes to Jason Fried's advice about dropping out of college. He's a big fan of convincing people to quit and start working, at least in the software industry. I went to school as a chemical engineer, and though often it seems the education's specifics are a waste to me, I learned how to approach problems rigorously and, in your words, relentlessly. I'm not sure I'd have that same drive if I wasn't challenged like that from the teachers and the education.

ww520 17y ago

If you know the stuff, do it yourself. If you don't know it, hire someone else to do it. If you don't have money, well, you find a cofounder.

byrneseyeview 17y ago

Determination is a good thing, but determination without direction is not. If you're good at design, and bad at programming, why insist on doing the programming yourself? A designer-programmer team will almost certainly kick your ass. If you have a particular skill that seems to be part of a generalized skill set (for example, if you're good at meeting new people, you're likely to be good at sales), you can test it. If you know that you're bad at math, bad at logic, bad at working on one task for more than a few minutes at a time, and bad at spotting your own mistakes, you might not want to try programming (or architecture) just to prove to yourself that you have the willpower to overcome your character traits.

nate 17y ago
Yep, and that's why I think it's still a great idea to partner with people who are good at those skills. But if you are stuck at the finding a partner phase because you don't have friends with those skills and don't have any money, why get stuck? Just going through the motion of learning something you don't even want to learn is likely going to put you into circles of people WHO DO HAVE the passion in doing those things. I've met dozens of people stuck at that finding someone else phase. Maybe they should look at it with a Zen attitude "to find a partner, become independent". I think many people dating and looking for others recognize that already. Needy/desperate people have a hard time finding those people they need and are desperate to meet :) So make yourself independent and those relationships will come easier.
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  I think you're looking at binary choices: give up, or forge ahead. Whereas I tend to see it as a question of picking among infinitely many desirable options. In that case, optimizing based on what you're best at is essential. That actually answers the Zen question, too: don't become independent by learning how to solve every problem, but by getting into a situation in which the problems you're faced with are the ones you're best at solving.
jrwoodruff 17y ago
I actually had this exact problem. I started out in print design - newspapers to be exact - 5 years ago. About 3 years ago I realized a lot of the ideas I had and wanted to pursue needed a web developer, and a web designer. But I was surrounded by copy editors and press guys (not that there's anything wrong with that...) So I learned Flash. Programmed some terrible, which-button-did-I-attach-that-code-to games, then took a programming class at the community college. Learned about loops, and iteration and general object-oriented theory. I made better flash programs and built a portfolio that got me a job building websites. After which I learned how to actually build a web site using CSS and XHTML instead of flash. Now, I'm surrounded by web developers, DBAs and generally tech-savvy folks, and I'm building one of my ideas with a very talented java-programming co-worker. It's taken longer than I wanted, but I'm still learning, and it's insanely rewarding, even if our product ends up being a complete bust. I'll never stop learning and trying new things, even if I'm not so good at them. It opens doors and creates opportunity.

tptacek 17y ago

Is Inkling using market scoring rules for liquidity? I've been wondering about that for awhile, and the Hanson reference makes me wonder more. (The LMSR is the only way I've managed to get a market work; I'm still totally stuck in automated market makers).

yankeeracer73 17y ago
Yes, it uses Hanson's market scoring rule.
- akkartik 17y ago
  That's the same Robin Hanson I've been reading at overcomingbias and lesswrong. I wasn't aware of his work on prediction markets. Most interesting.

coffeemug 17y ago

I would argue that the only skill a business owner really needs is the skill to identify, hire, and lead talent. Everything else is probably secondary. If you're not good at programming, learning to program in order to do it yourself is ridiculous advice - unless you spend ten years learning full time, you'll end up with a mediocre product. Delegation works. Just do it.

joe_the_user 17y ago
Yes, If someone happens to have programming skill, it might expand into the skill of knowing which programmer to hire. But the skills the parent identifies are inherently the core skills - anyone growing in business would want to gain them and leave their other skills by the way side (you aren't going to run your business like a twelve year doing his homework, are you?). Of course, I'd prefer not to live in the world of pure delegation so I'd rather go with being hired by someone with these skills. Oddly enough, the best managers of programmers actually don't jump in and program themselves!
vorador 17y ago
How do you identify a good programmer if you don't know programming ?
- dschobel 17y ago
  A track record of producing good products would be my instinctive answer were I a non-technical person. But since I'm a technical person, I'd ask them why manhole covers are round.
  - jderick 17y ago
    And hope they laugh and refer to Feynman
- coffeemug 17y ago
  It's not immediately clear to me that technical people are any better at identifying good programmers than non-technical ones.

tron_carter 17y ago

This was an inspiring article for someone like me with an business degree and aspirations for creating a startup but without the programming ability. Would starting out learning a language like python be recommended as a good one in general for putting an idea into action? After some iteration and traction, I'd bring on a capable coding partner to do it right. FWIW, I've also heard that Python is useful for making scripts for automating tasks or improving productivity.

aero142 17y ago
Yes. Python is a great learning language, and useful for many things long term.
jedc 17y ago
Python is great. O'Reilly is coming out with a book soon, "Head First Programming" that teaches programming, specifically using Python. It could be a great first start for you.
davidw 17y ago
Python and Ruby are great first languages; they'll let you do all kinds of things, from quick scripts to web programming to GUI's. There are some things for which they're not ideal, but they're still probably 'good enough'.
notauser 17y ago
This route (learn to code it yourself) is the one I took. I now have a pretty technically credible* product with actual paying customers and everything. The language I learned first was JavaScript because it's ubiquitous. There are a million tutorials to get you going. A lot of JS tutorials suck, which is a disadvantage, but it gives you a pretty big confidence boost to be able to read a tutorial and think "that's moronic, I know 6 other ways to do that which will work better". Python tutorials tend to break out advanced/elegant/clever stuff really quickly which has the opposite effect. I wrote a couple of little apps, then a prototype, then it felt like I knew enough to really get going. I then picked up Python (actually Django) because the relative maturity of server side JS platforms isn't as good. Switching languages was easy. The total time to get to that point was about 4 months (whilst working full time), but I had the advantage of living in a place where everything shut when it went dark at 7pm. *Except for the bugs, and the scaling issues, and the bad design decisions I made early on. As far as I can tell I'm not the only person to have problems like this though, and refactoring is a good way to spend a plane ride.

tpyo 17y ago

I was expecting something completely different by the title. I was thinking of how, when you grow older, your curiosity dies because it takes too much effort to satisfy it. This worries me. I have a friend who was saying the same thing, but he was uninterested in doing anything about it.

drhodes 17y ago
I think curiosity dies out for two reasons. The first is plain ol' brain chemistry. Secondly, when people get older and they sit down at a computer, they do so to get stuff done. When a kid sits down at a machine they explore without expectation of themselves. Adults have the expectation that - what they want to get done - will get done - and in a reasonable amount of time. However, some things do take more than a "reasonable amount of time", and frustration mounts because of this expectation. Soon, learning new things becomes associated with frustration. So relax a little, and explore a lot. Then read the docs. Or read the docs - and then explore. Just don't expect to be productive in the New-Software-Product in 2 hours.

nihilocrat 17y ago

"I have this great idea for a *video game*, I just need someone to build it. How do I find a *coder* and build this *video game* in a couple months?". This happens so often on gamedev-related forums it's depressing. Pure beginners often lack the gumption, or perhaps just the knowledge, to realize that they could and usually should just do everything themselves, or at least learn how to code a game or use a game making application. In these days of 200-person AAA development teams I can understand the sentiment that developers by nature are super-specialized, and that having multiple skillsets just doesn't compute.

joelhaus 17y ago

The bottom-line in this article is that you need to take the steps necessary to get a project done. Even if this means self-educating, don't let that prevent you from accomplishing your goals. In reality, this isn't always feasible. That's why it's so important to have good judgment about these things. It reminds me of this quote: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. - Reinhold Niebuhr [UPDATED] This isn't meant to be a religious statement, I'm just crediting the original. You can just as easily replace "god" with "imagination" or "consciousness" or whatever if that makes it more palatable.

hyperbovine 17y ago

The analogy at the top is flawed. The 7-year old has zero opportunity cost. His time is worthless. If you have a great idea, but also the burden of supporting a family, holding down a day job, or whatever, hiring somebody to build your idea might make good sense.

wendroid 17y ago