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> 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professio

> 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer. That's a matter of ambition/risk. That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that. It's just that he many not be good enough to make a career of it. So yes he will look foolish but in the end, he will still be better than the rest. If we scale back the risk levels, then this is probably true. For instance, focus on a particular field of software where there is a decent demand and you will very likely be able to live off of it. Focus on being the founder of a successful company in a space that can only tolerate at most a handful of players (that's pretty much any business, once you properly define it) is a LOT harder and sheer willpower is not the only thing required to be successful.

BeetleB 9y ago
>That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that. Not true. Trust me. There is no guarantee. You've not met people who are singularly pursuing a goal, and it's clear they'll never improve past what they've already achieved (which can be no better than average)?
dasil003 9y ago
> Focus on being the founder of a successful company in a space that can only tolerate at most a handful of players (that's pretty much any business, once you properly define it) is a LOT harder and sheer willpower is not the only thing required to be successful. I agree with your whole post, but I urge caution at your parenthetical because it could easily play into the VC mentality of needing 9-10 figures to consider a company successful. Of course it's easy for them to take the risk with other people's money, but as a founder you need to ask yourself what your goal is. It's dangerous for two reasons: first, you may build something amazing that would easily have been sustainable but fails because unchecked greed demands that it be the biggest even if that is not it's fundamental value (ie. see Twitter). The other is that billion dollar companies are not built by dreaming of the perfect vision, but rather smart execution leveraging available resources and opportunities—the vision sounds good in Wired article, but there are millions of dreamers with visions that never accomplished anything; you need execution and relentless learning, and that is very hard if you are not focused on where you are now and where you want to be in a few weeks or months.
hoxinot 9y ago
I think the "risk" part of "ambition/risk" part of is what the OP was referring to, and I think not recognizing the relationship, in a kind of rampant survivorship bias, is a bit part of the problem with contemporary society. I'm not really critiquing what you wrote, because I'm not sure how it applies to what I'm thinking, but to me it seems like there's a danger in assuming that degree of success in life or lack thereof arises from lack of ambition per se. I think as ambition increases, so does risk, in general, so lack of success could be due to lack of ambition, but many very ambitious people who just have been on the bad side of circumstances, in the wrong place or at the wrong time. I worry a bit about an implicit assumption that we often make that someone could always have "tried harder," which seems to be the argument of the essay now that I think about it. If a failure situation arises, we tend to pick it apart and look for what the person did wrong, and then if we find anything, ascribe blame to the person. In some situations--maybe always, that sort of introspection is helpful, but often I worry it misses the broader picture, in terms of the value of what was given up, or why that person was put in the position to begin with. We also don't scrutinize success as often to look at stupid decisions that could have panned out very poorly, and blame the individual--often there's an implicit pass, like "oh this person is so lucky," as if that luck is an attribute of the person, and marvel at that luck instead as if it's something to reward. This essay kind of hit hard, because at middle age I've realized that the field / career area I'm in is in crisis, a sort of house of cards, and at some level driven by fundamentally unethical or unsound phenomena. My choice is basically to suck it up and just go along with it, or ditch the whole thing and start over as if I was in my 20s. If I ditch things, I feel like I'm by definition a failure by many, and ignoring this compounding benefits idea, but if I stay with it, I'm just supporting a system that I feel resentful about and that I think is going to fall apart eventually one way or another, even if some are inevitably going to be remaining at the top of that rubble pile. I guess one way to think about it is this: in life, for most things, that compounding benefits curve is accompanied by a compounding costs curve, and sometimes the difference doesn't look compounding at all.
dozzie 9y ago
>> 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer. > That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that. From what I read somewhere, he retired from golf because of back injury. So if my memory serves right, it renders your "[he] will still be a very good golfer" ridiculous, because no, he will never be a golfer anymore.

BeetleB 9y ago

>That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that. Not true. Trust me. There is no guarantee. You've not met people who are singularly pursuing a goal, and it's clear they'll never improve past what they've already achieved (which can be no better than average)?

dasil003 9y ago

> Focus on being the founder of a successful company in a space that can only tolerate at most a handful of players (that's pretty much any business, once you properly define it) is a LOT harder and sheer willpower is not the only thing required to be successful. I agree with your whole post, but I urge caution at your parenthetical because it could easily play into the VC mentality of needing 9-10 figures to consider a company successful. Of course it's easy for them to take the risk with other people's money, but as a founder you need to ask yourself what your goal is. It's dangerous for two reasons: first, you may build something amazing that would easily have been sustainable but fails because unchecked greed demands that it be the biggest even if that is not it's fundamental value (ie. see Twitter). The other is that billion dollar companies are not built by dreaming of the perfect vision, but rather smart execution leveraging available resources and opportunities—the vision sounds good in Wired article, but there are millions of dreamers with visions that never accomplished anything; you need execution and relentless learning, and that is very hard if you are not focused on where you are now and where you want to be in a few weeks or months.

hoxinot 9y ago

I think the "risk" part of "ambition/risk" part of is what the OP was referring to, and I think not recognizing the relationship, in a kind of rampant survivorship bias, is a bit part of the problem with contemporary society. I'm not really critiquing what you wrote, because I'm not sure how it applies to what I'm thinking, but to me it seems like there's a danger in assuming that degree of success in life or lack thereof arises from lack of ambition per se. I think as ambition increases, so does risk, in general, so lack of success could be due to lack of ambition, but many very ambitious people who just have been on the bad side of circumstances, in the wrong place or at the wrong time. I worry a bit about an implicit assumption that we often make that someone could always have "tried harder," which seems to be the argument of the essay now that I think about it. If a failure situation arises, we tend to pick it apart and look for what the person did wrong, and then if we find anything, ascribe blame to the person. In some situations--maybe always, that sort of introspection is helpful, but often I worry it misses the broader picture, in terms of the value of what was given up, or why that person was put in the position to begin with. We also don't scrutinize success as often to look at stupid decisions that could have panned out very poorly, and blame the individual--often there's an implicit pass, like "oh this person is so lucky," as if that luck is an attribute of the person, and marvel at that luck instead as if it's something to reward. This essay kind of hit hard, because at middle age I've realized that the field / career area I'm in is in crisis, a sort of house of cards, and at some level driven by fundamentally unethical or unsound phenomena. My choice is basically to suck it up and just go along with it, or ditch the whole thing and start over as if I was in my 20s. If I ditch things, I feel like I'm by definition a failure by many, and ignoring this compounding benefits idea, but if I stay with it, I'm just supporting a system that I feel resentful about and that I think is going to fall apart eventually one way or another, even if some are inevitably going to be remaining at the top of that rubble pile. I guess one way to think about it is this: in life, for most things, that compounding benefits curve is accompanied by a compounding costs curve, and sometimes the difference doesn't look compounding at all.

dozzie 9y ago

>> 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer. > That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that. From what I read somewhere, he retired from golf because of back injury. So if my memory serves right, it renders your "[he] will still be a very good golfer" ridiculous, because no, he will never be a golfer anymore.