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Confirmation Bias – Why nobody is allowed to be successful on the internet

52 points by jasonkester 8y ago

namanyayg 8y ago
There's definitely skepticism about success stories but it's not all invalid either. Many such stories are found to be marketing pieces for their app/service when you reach the end, and it makes sense that authors would be incentived to fabricate details. Look at all the Kickstarter fails, see all the "dropshipping" success stories; there's plenty of scams and lies in this industry.
smokestack412 8y ago
This guy just learned the term "confirmation bias." The ability to take risk is a privilege that many don't have and he doesn't get that. A lot of really unsuccessful people work incredibly hard and never get lucky. He's demonstrated in one word-vomit of a blog post how ignorant (and unappreciative) he is of his own luck. Good job bro.
- jasonkester 8y ago
  How about we grant that luck is a factor and that you need to be in a situation where you're able to at least try? That still leaves roughly everybody here in the pool of people who can build a software business in their nights and weekends. The important takeaway is that so many people, yourself included it would seem, use confirmation bias as a shield they can hide behind. A way of proving to themselves that success is impossible, and that therefore the best course of action is not to try at all. That's a shame, since it's so self-reinforcing. If you never even try, it doesn't matter how good the odds are. You still won't get there.
  - smokestack412 8y ago
    I've been successful way beyond my control and I understand that. This guy doesn't and blames people who weren't for making him feel bad.
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      FYI: You're replying to the person who wrote the article. That said, I do think he's raging against people pointing out Survivorship bias [1] rather than Confirmation bias. But perhaps the confusion between the two is the reason he's missing the point: the "critics" are not so much pointing out that a successful person's advice is worthless and that their success is sheer luck and that therefore you shouldn't try - it's that whatever worked for them might not work for you, and whatever did not work for them might work for you. In other words, don't expect a successful person's advice to be a magic formula, and don't be discouraged if their advice seems unattainable for you to follow. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
      - smokestack412 8y ago
        I read the premise of the article to be that people who aren't successful a) aren't taking enough risks, and b) aren't working hard enough. This is wrong in at least two ways and denigrates people who a) can't, and b) are. I'm restating my original point but please correct me if I'm wrong. I find that kind of reasoning to be utterly disgusting, ignorant and self-serving. That was my issue with the article.
        jasonkester 8y ago
        Allow me to correct your misunderstanding. My premise is that there are way too many people who haven't built successful software companies because they a) never even tried. And, that the reason many of them never tried is because of rationalizations that the "successful" people must have had some special quality that they themselves could never possess, and that therefore it would be pointless to try at all. Which is a shame.
        smokestack412 8y ago
        Your premise has something to do with your success preventing you from being able to give advice to people? Something again about your success, and how you've been successful? And how your success facilitated your success? "Maybe what you're really seeing is Confirmation Bias and, again, everything you have to say is worthless." "Which is annoying." "Because it misses the point."
treve 8y ago
The article has an interesting premise, but ultimately fails to deliver. It's feels like someone venting or feeling insecure about a recent experience, and now I'm just left wondering what it was that upset them.
- jstandard 8y ago
  I also felt this way. There is a large amount of "one weird tip" self-promotional blogspam in the startup space. Self-promotion isn't bad on it's own, we all have motivations at some level. But too often pulling back the curtain on the "how I bootstrapped into $30k MRR while living on a beach" stories reveals something far different than the simple tips prescribed. For something at a larger scale, I recommend critiques of Jim Collins' "Good to Great".
- pdimitar 8y ago
  Yeah, especially him feeling bad that a "clown on the internet" disagrees with them. And he's successful. Like WTF? You managed to make it, unlike most other people on the planet. Feel good about yourself and don't argue with people on the internet. He has self-worth problems.
speedplane 8y ago
Most successful companies have to execute perfectly AND have an some of those extrinsic factors, such as family money, personal connections, good timing, or dumb luck. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that. It doesn't make the successful founders bad or less worthy to give advice, it helps explain the conditions necessary for success. Anyone receiving advice should be aware of the prerequisites to that advice.
- cpkpad 8y ago
  Nope. I've seen plenty of successful companies bumble around and have dumb luck. The reverse is also true -- perfect execution is rare and almost guarantees success. I'll reemphasize that even competent execution is rare; few people can execute perfectly on business AND technology AND marketing AND design AND .... Especially first-time entrepreneurs. Fortunately, the other guy's deeply imperfect too. In capitalism, you just have to be better than the other guy. It's pretty hard -- the other guy has been at it for a while and you're just starting out, but it's far from impossible. Most businesses execute very poorly. Fortunately, each time you try to execute, you get a little bit better at all of those, so after a few tries, you can out-execute. You also learn the advantages smaller, more agile players have over bigger ones. I agree with the persistence bias argument 100%.
  - speedplane 8y ago
    Ive seen plenty of successful companies that got lucky, but none with dumb luck. Which are you referring to?
  - smokestack412 8y ago
    Execution is an HN startup meme. Correctly: most businesses execute very unluckily. You're hopelessly down the rabbit hole if you think skill has the most to do with it, it's total nonsense. VCs don't invest in skill, they invest in crapshoots. Skill is a prerequisite, luck is what makes people rich. Don't pretend otherwise or you'll make it more painful when you fail (99% of the time).
    - 8y ago
grecy 8y ago
This applies to basically everything on the internet now, not only starting a company or something similar. What everyone seems to forget is the truth that a successful person is one who failed a lot and just tried one more time. For example - Dr Seuss was rejected by 100 publishers before he found one that said yes. What's the important part of that story? He kept trying. I feel certain if he posted on the internet today (especially HN) "Hey everyone, I followed my dreams and got my quirky children's books published" with the advice of following your dreams, there would be a hundred comments saying "blah, blah, advising others to follow their dreams is all about Confirmation Bias." "Confirmation Bias" is just a convenient excuse the internet has when what they really mean to say is "What you're proposing is not without it's risks, and I'm too scared to take that risk."
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > What everyone seems to forget is the truth that a successful person is one who failed a lot and just tried one more time Consider, too, measuring every person based on their deviance from the norm. (For sake of argument, imagine a one-dimensional measure.) By definition, these would be the only people capable of shifting the norm. Ex ante it is impossible–based purely on consensus seeking–to discern the mad from the brilliant.
- rocannon 8y ago
  When looking at someone like Dr Seuss who kept trying after numerous failures, you also have to consider that there's an opportunity cost to doing what he did. Note: his story "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" was rejected 27 times before being accepted: https://www.npr.org/2012/01/24/145471724/how-dr-seuss-got-his-start-on-mulberry-street https://www.npr.org/2012/01/24/145471724/how-dr-seuss-got-hi... Maybe if he'd been rejected 100 times, it would have been worth thinking about trying something else? Also, if you follow the above link, you find that Dr Seuss admitted it was sheer luck that he got published. He was ready to give up! '"He bumped into a friend ... who had just become an editor at a publishing house in the children's section," McLain explains. Geisel told the friend that he'd simply given up and planned to destroy the book, but the editor asked to take a look... "He said if he had been walking down the other side of the street, he probably would never have become a children's author," McLain says.' I'm guessing, but I'd think that for most people, getting rejected after trying the _same thing_ 100 times probably means that your product is not good. So giving up after some reasonable number of tries, and pursuing _something else_, is often the better course. If you have nothing better to do, and don't mind failing in the end, then you can keep trying, too! The problem then is trying to figure out when to quit, and when to keep trying at the same thing. Some people have faith in themselves because they know that their product is great. But it's hard to tell the difference between justified self-confidence and unjustified self-delusion.
jondubois 8y ago
Maybe the author should write a follow-up article in a few years after a hotshot VC-backed startup or a large corporation starts competing with his product and destroys his company. If I was the author and I didn't have personal connections to tech elites, I would try to sell my business ASAP. Paradoxically though, not having those elite connections does make it harder to get your startup acquired.
- jasonkester 8y ago
  Does this concern come from experience? Or is it just your expectation of how the world works? I find it hard to believe that there are currently any hotshot VC-backed startups executing hard to crush a little $10k MRR market and push out the incumbent mom & pop SaaS currently occupying it. Every once in a while you'll see one of those shops get stepped on accidentally by a feature of a giant company. But I can't think of any examples of a "Show HN: My little bootstrapped thing that pays the rent" that was subsequently targeted for extermination.
  - jondubois 8y ago
    It's from both personal experience and from discussions with others. It happened to me for every project that I've started. The first time was a drag-and-drop CMS; this industry quickly attracted several VC funded competitors and they were very fast in terms of development so I had no chance to compete on my own and so I gave up after 3 years. Second time was an open source project; a full stack Javascript framework. Competitors (MeteorJS and other smaller ones) also started spawning up and I was struggling to keep users so I extracted a small part of my project and spun it off as its own standalone open source product - That was maybe 1 or 2 years before MeteorJS decided to do something similar by spinning off Apollo. Thankfully MeteorJS spun off in a different direction than me so my project was able to survive and achieve linear growth year on year since. I have other stories from many colleagues I worked with over the years (as a contractor for many different companies) so I'm basically sure that what I'm saying is correct. I'm pretty sure that my social circle is an accurate representation of the 'typical developer/entrepreneur' as well; I'm pretty sure that this is the majority. Oh and trust me, a big company will take over this space eventually. Their product will do more and integrate better with other products.
hevi_jos 8y ago
From my point of view the biggest gift if your life if you want to make a business is not money, it is not connections, it is just mindset, and the emotional training of your parents. The most successful people I know in business have no formal education, no career. My super smart friends with PhDs and advanced degrees can't touch a business with a 100 meters stick. They work in places like Academia, constantly talking bad about it. They will be paralyzed at taking risks, handling this much responsibility over other people. The constant fight, people looking at you for guidance and having to decide with incomplete information,people not paying you, your salaries, your taxes... The anxiety they would face is too much for them. With all the money in the world, with all the connections it takes an entire emotional reprogramming of your mind to be able to handle this. I regularly see people with 100.000, 200.000 euros in the bank telling me they can't create the business they always dreamed about, if only they had enough money...the reality is that they are in doubt, insecure about risking their own money but somewhat they expect someone else to risk their own money trusting them when they can't even trust themselves.
- cpkpad 8y ago
  You have to look at the other side of the equation too: expenses and family structures. $200k euros in the bank is a ton if you're a single student. It's a very short runway if you have 6k/month in mortgage, 2k/month in childcare, car costs, educational debt, and so on. Unfortunately, most people don't have that type of savings until they're also saddled with obligations.
- gammatrigono 8y ago
  This is why investing is a thing for people at almost all levels. People with reasonable wealth but limited appetite for risk and effort can simply (through equity purchase) pay other people to be entrepreneurs for them, and both parties share in the rewards (or losses).
bobosha 8y ago
Survivorship bias is more apt here.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I sometimes wonder if there is something genetic involved here. From an evolutionary perspective, a society full of 'leaders' is one that's going to collapse. You need a large proportion of followers to maintain social order. There was an interesting article a while back indicating that entrepreneurs were much more likely than average to have tried to sell things at an earlier age, taken on a job at an earlier age, and generally engage in a variety of atypical behavior from a very early age -- independent of class. Bezos, as an example, worked at McDonald's during one summer, hated it, and the next summer started a week long summer camp for kids -- with a whopping 6 signups for the first batch, but still probably earning more in that week than he did in the summer months at McDonalds -- certainly having more fun. Jack Ma is perhaps the most pure example of this phenomena. [1] But of course not everybody can do this. I mean they technically can, but neither the market nor society would be able to sustain itself if everybody decided to try to lead and create instead of follow and consume. Perhaps it sounds extreme, yet people regularly attribute vastly more esoteric notions, such as mastery of everything from board games to music, to genetic factors. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma
sbr464 8y ago
I can recommend his s3stat software. We used it to analyze thousands of devices that were uploading daily backups. It made it easy to see devices that had incorrect backup configs, for example, were uploading active .pst files from outlook etc, that changed daily (causing large continuous uploads) and other similar files. Also more active clients that allowed us to understand/handle pricing differently.
cortic 8y ago
The reason advice from successful entrepreneurs is generally considered worthless is because for every successful person there are thousands or millions of unsuccessful people who did exactly the same thing, worked just as hard and weren't successful. There is probably an equation here where; the number of simultaneous unsuccessful identical attempts is proportional to the magnitude of the success multiplied by the fame or notoriety of the successful. There is no magic recipe for success, and anyone trying to sell such a thing is trying to sell snake-oil, or trying to feel special. This depends of course on how you define success, as it applies to the above pseudo equation.
- tondar 8y ago
  Then I wonder about people who are trying to give advice about how to take advice from themselves because they claim they're successful. It seems like a rung beneath snake-oil.
hokus 8y ago
keep trying until the unfair advantages line up :P
- cimmanom 8y ago
  Most people don’t have the good fortune to be in a financial position to keep trying.
asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
> You see, the biggest reason the business in question was successful was that our hero went out and built it. He actually tried. This is begging the question. That is exactly what people who make accusations of bias are contesting. (Although I'd say survivorship bias is probably the more appropriate choice.)
sfoblowsjose 8y ago
I've spent years living out of a backpack. Why is it cheap? It sucks. Southeast Asia is hot, humid and full of Western douchebags. Most whom are looking to explore their sexuality and ditch thier mommy issues. You can start a business but can't grow one from SE Asia. The author is right, anyone with two clients can do it. Good to see some enjoy living and working from nowhere.
gumboshoes 8y ago
In which the author condemns poor thinking and then commits his own in the form generalizations, cherry-picking, not-me-ism, and edge case selection.
lbj 8y ago
The zeitgeist is even worse than this post suggests. The common thread is that no-one can stand out. There are no exceptional executive's, the are "leaders who lead from behind". We see the horrible effects of this false humility most clearly in Elon Musk. Determined he was, to be the one suffering the most at Tesla - And the result is a man bearing all the markings of a mental breakdown, tearing the stock to bits with tweets that could only come from a man who's been suffering for far too long.
jadell 8y ago
It is survivorship bias when someone says "they're not lucky, they just kept trying and failing until they succeeded." The vast majority of people don't have the time/money/talent/resources to keep trying new ideas again and again until they succeed. There are many who use their life's savings, sacrifice their relationships, drain their personal health in pursuing an idea. Whether or not that idea is successful is dependent on many factors outside the person's control. The uniting factor is that if that one idea fails, that's it. That was that person's one shot, and now they've lost everything and have to go back to the grind. Being able to fail yet still having the resources try a dozen more ideas comes down to where you are starting from, and luck plays a huge role in that.
- jasonkester 8y ago
  That was that person's one shot The nice thing about our industry is that "shots" are essentially free. When domain names cost seven dollars and hosting is measured in pennies per month, you can try as many things as it takes until you find something that works. The only thing you risk is some nights and weekends. Here's Josh Pigford's list of the 50 failed business ideas he pursued in the 15 years before he found success with Baremetrics: https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1033032915175858176 https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1033032915175858176
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    No. You also need marketing, and that's very expensive. Especially if you don't have people to tell about your new project. > The only thing you risk is some nights and weekends. Are you familiar with the alien and unnatural concept of burnout? Or of being tired? It happens only to creatures on the other side of the galaxy but maybe you have heard of it?
  - jadell 8y ago
    Anyone can throw up a marketing site with no actual product behind it to "gauge interest" in a weekend for a few dollars (though even a few dollars isn't trivial to everyone, so can't be assumed.) Marketing, actually building the thing, maintaining it long term, possibly quitting your job to pursue the idea. These things are hard and life-altering when you're living paycheck-to-paycheck (as the vast majority of Americans are), or on less than living wage, or potentially with a family to support or having a chronic medical condition to deal with. We can't assume everyone is in a situation that allows them unlimited nights and weekend time. It's also biased towards software companies; not every idea worth pursuing is in software. It takes time, money, and effort to build a company that makes tangible things.
hprotagonist 8y ago
Randy could see where it was going. Kivistik had gone for the usual academicians’s ace in the hole: everything is relative, it’s all just differing perspectives. People had already begun to resume their little side conversations, thinking that the conflict was over, when Randy gave them all a start with: “Who decides what’s bad? I do.” Even Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was flustered. He wasn’t sure if Randy was joking. “Excuse me?” Randy was in no great hurry to answer the question. He took the opportunity to sit back comfortably, stretch, and take a sip of his wine. He was feeling good. “It’s like this,” he said. “I’ve read your book. I’ve seen you on TV. I’ve heard you tonight. I personally typed up a list of your credentials when preparing press materials for this conference. So I know that you’re not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues.” “Oh,” Kivistik said in mock confusion, “I didn’t realize one had to have qualifications.” “I think it’s clear,” Randy said, “that if you are ignorant of a particular subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I’m sick, I don’t ask a plumber for advice. I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I have questions about the Internet, I will seek opinions from people who know about it.” “funny how all of the technocrats seem to be in favor of the Internet,” Kivistik said cheerily, milking a few more laughs from the crowd. “You have just made a statement that is demonstrably not true,” Randy said, pleasantly enough. “A number of Internet experts have written well-reasoned books that are sharply critical of it.” Kivistik was finally getting pissed off. All the levity was gone. “So,” Randy continued, “to get back to where we started, the Information Superhighway is a bad metaphor for the Internet, because I say it is. There might be a thousand people on the planet who are as conversant with the Internet as I am. I know most of these people. None of them takes that metaphor seriously. Q.E.D.” “Oh. I see,” Kivistik said, a little hotly. He had seen an opening. “So we should rely on the technocrats to tell us what to think, and how to think, about this technology.” The expressions of the others seemed to say that this was a telling blow, righteously struck. “I’m not sure what a technocrat is,” Randy said. “Am I a technocrat? I’m just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocal of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?” “You belonged to the technocratic elite even before you pick up that book,” Kivistik said. “The ability to wade through a technical text, and to understand it, is a privilege. It is a privilige conferred by an education that is available only to members of an elite class. That’s what I meant by a technocrat.” “I went to a public school,” Randy said. “And then I went to a state university. From that point on, I was self-educated.” Charlene broke in. [. . .] “And your family?” Charlene asked frostily. Randy took a deep breath, stifled the urge to sigh. “My father’s an engineer. He teaches at a state college.” “And his father?” “A mathemetician.” Charlene raised her eyebrows. So did nearly everyone else at the table. Case closed. “I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat,” Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person’s language[ . . .]. Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly, etiqutte dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed. Others gasped in outrage to hear these words coming from the lips of a known and convicted white male technocrat. “No one in my family has ever had much money or power,” he said. “I think the point that Charlene’s making is like this,” said Tomas, [. . .] “Just by virtue of coming from a scientific family, you are a member of a privileged elite. You’re not aware of it—but members of privileged elites are rarely aware of their privileges.” Randy finished the thought. “Until people like you come along to explain to us how stupid, to say nothing of morally bankrupt, we are.” “The false consiousness Tomas is speaking of is exactly what makes entrenched power elites so entrenched,” Charlene said. “Well, I don’t feel very entrenched,” Randy said. “I’ve worked my ass off to get where I’ve gotten.” “A lot of people work hard all their lives and get nowhere,” someone said accusingly. Look out! The sniping had begun. “Well, I’m sorry I haven’t had the good grace to get nowhere,” Randy said, now feeling just a bit surly for the first time, “but I have found that if you work hard, educate yourself, and keep your wits about you, you can find your way in this society.” “But that’s straight out of some nineteenth-century Horatio Alger book,” Thomas sputtered. “So? Just because it’s an old idea, doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” Randy said. 1999
pdimitar 8y ago
> The real reason you succeeded were all those unfair advantages that you had. Everything that you enumerated in this section is luck. Rich parents is not something you can work on, for example. > Worse, if you do manage to persuade these people that you were in fact not all that rich or successful when you started out, and that the only connections you have were even more broke than you, well, you still don't get to give advice. Broke connections > no connections. I have zero connections right now. I would have to pocket 5-digit sum for marketing expenses. If I want to start a business, I have nobody to say that to. Random internet strangers don't help. > And that's really all those "how I built an X" writeups are describing: Stop with the universal wisdom. It does not exist. Only thing I will grant you is -- you won't gain anything from luck if you don't show up. That's it. > Dismissing the author's wisdom and not trying to start a business will never, ever, in a million years, leave you with a successful business. Who said it will? WTF? > And if you keep trying, eventually you might be lucky enough to have some clown on the internet dismiss all your hard work as Confirmation Bias. Why do you care about "some clown on the internet"? You said you live comfortably off of the profits of one of your products. Go and enjoy your life and ignore people who obviously don't want to listen to you. Take the hint. > If you try something with a 10% chance of success enough times, eventually it will work. Think of it as Persistence Bias if you like, and it makes a lot more sense. Not all of us can try 50 times. Most of us cannot. If I try 2 or 3 times and fail, my savings are gone and I might actually have to live on the street. Thought of that? Thought of people who are already burned out from too many failures before? Yeah, "keep trying". Sure. When the only thing you want is some peace of mind and the world just to leave you the frak alone for 2 years but no, you have to try even harder now. A-ha. Your recipe of success via persistence is an eye-opener! Nobody ever thought of that before! > You see, the biggest reason the business in question was successful was that our hero went out and built it. He actually tried. True. If you never try, you will never succeed. Again though, many people cannot try 20+ times, or even 5. Don't forget that. Your post is a useless rant (like my reply here). People discard successful people advice because it's highly context-sensitive and includes a ton of factors that played in the favor of the said person. What worked for you might not work for many others -- and what did not work for you might work perfectly for me. This is universally true and it makes you an a-hole to dismiss it. All in all, a superfluous article which mostly makes you wonder why a successful person cares about what random people say. OP needs therapy sessions on self-worth.
RickJWagner 8y ago
At least in some circles, meritocracy seems to have a strong bearing on success. A good example is Linus Torvalds. He dreamed up Linux, which is an outside-the-park home run. Then he thought up Git, which is another runaway winner. As a programmer, I am happy with my own skill set. But I recognize that Linus plays in a whole other league. There are others that are likewise serial succeeders, and in different disciplines. P Diddy (nee Puff Daddy) is an example here. This guy just digs and digs until he succeeds. So I don't buy into the idea that external forces are the reason for others' successes. I just think some people are gifted and they exploit what they've got.

52 points by jasonkester 8y ago

There's definitely skepticism about success stories but it's not all invalid either. Many such stories are found to be marketing pieces for their app/service when you reach the end, and it makes sense that authors would be incentived to fabricate details. Look at all the Kickstarter fails, see all the "dropshipping" success stories; there's plenty of scams and lies in this industry.

smokestack412 8y ago

This guy just learned the term "confirmation bias." The ability to take risk is a privilege that many don't have and he doesn't get that. A lot of really unsuccessful people work incredibly hard and never get lucky. He's demonstrated in one word-vomit of a blog post how ignorant (and unappreciative) he is of his own luck. Good job bro.

jasonkester 8y ago
How about we grant that luck is a factor and that you need to be in a situation where you're able to at least try? That still leaves roughly everybody here in the pool of people who can build a software business in their nights and weekends. The important takeaway is that so many people, yourself included it would seem, use confirmation bias as a shield they can hide behind. A way of proving to themselves that success is impossible, and that therefore the best course of action is not to try at all. That's a shame, since it's so self-reinforcing. If you never even try, it doesn't matter how good the odds are. You still won't get there.
- smokestack412 8y ago
  I've been successful way beyond my control and I understand that. This guy doesn't and blames people who weren't for making him feel bad.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    FYI: You're replying to the person who wrote the article. That said, I do think he's raging against people pointing out Survivorship bias [1] rather than Confirmation bias. But perhaps the confusion between the two is the reason he's missing the point: the "critics" are not so much pointing out that a successful person's advice is worthless and that their success is sheer luck and that therefore you shouldn't try - it's that whatever worked for them might not work for you, and whatever did not work for them might work for you. In other words, don't expect a successful person's advice to be a magic formula, and don't be discouraged if their advice seems unattainable for you to follow. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
    - smokestack412 8y ago
      I read the premise of the article to be that people who aren't successful a) aren't taking enough risks, and b) aren't working hard enough. This is wrong in at least two ways and denigrates people who a) can't, and b) are. I'm restating my original point but please correct me if I'm wrong. I find that kind of reasoning to be utterly disgusting, ignorant and self-serving. That was my issue with the article.
      - jasonkester 8y ago
        Allow me to correct your misunderstanding. My premise is that there are way too many people who haven't built successful software companies because they a) never even tried. And, that the reason many of them never tried is because of rationalizations that the "successful" people must have had some special quality that they themselves could never possess, and that therefore it would be pointless to try at all. Which is a shame.
        smokestack412 8y ago
        Your premise has something to do with your success preventing you from being able to give advice to people? Something again about your success, and how you've been successful? And how your success facilitated your success? "Maybe what you're really seeing is Confirmation Bias and, again, everything you have to say is worthless." "Which is annoying." "Because it misses the point."

treve 8y ago

The article has an interesting premise, but ultimately fails to deliver. It's feels like someone venting or feeling insecure about a recent experience, and now I'm just left wondering what it was that upset them.

jstandard 8y ago
I also felt this way. There is a large amount of "one weird tip" self-promotional blogspam in the startup space. Self-promotion isn't bad on it's own, we all have motivations at some level. But too often pulling back the curtain on the "how I bootstrapped into $30k MRR while living on a beach" stories reveals something far different than the simple tips prescribed. For something at a larger scale, I recommend critiques of Jim Collins' "Good to Great".
pdimitar 8y ago
Yeah, especially him feeling bad that a "clown on the internet" disagrees with them. And he's successful. Like WTF? You managed to make it, unlike most other people on the planet. Feel good about yourself and don't argue with people on the internet. He has self-worth problems.

speedplane 8y ago

Most successful companies have to execute perfectly AND have an some of those extrinsic factors, such as family money, personal connections, good timing, or dumb luck. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that. It doesn't make the successful founders bad or less worthy to give advice, it helps explain the conditions necessary for success. Anyone receiving advice should be aware of the prerequisites to that advice.

cpkpad 8y ago
Nope. I've seen plenty of successful companies bumble around and have dumb luck. The reverse is also true -- perfect execution is rare and almost guarantees success. I'll reemphasize that even competent execution is rare; few people can execute perfectly on business AND technology AND marketing AND design AND .... Especially first-time entrepreneurs. Fortunately, the other guy's deeply imperfect too. In capitalism, you just have to be better than the other guy. It's pretty hard -- the other guy has been at it for a while and you're just starting out, but it's far from impossible. Most businesses execute very poorly. Fortunately, each time you try to execute, you get a little bit better at all of those, so after a few tries, you can out-execute. You also learn the advantages smaller, more agile players have over bigger ones. I agree with the persistence bias argument 100%.
- speedplane 8y ago
  Ive seen plenty of successful companies that got lucky, but none with dumb luck. Which are you referring to?
- smokestack412 8y ago
  Execution is an HN startup meme. Correctly: most businesses execute very unluckily. You're hopelessly down the rabbit hole if you think skill has the most to do with it, it's total nonsense. VCs don't invest in skill, they invest in crapshoots. Skill is a prerequisite, luck is what makes people rich. Don't pretend otherwise or you'll make it more painful when you fail (99% of the time).
  - 8y ago

grecy 8y ago

This applies to basically everything on the internet now, not only starting a company or something similar. What everyone seems to forget is the truth that a successful person is one who failed a lot and just tried one more time. For example - Dr Seuss was rejected by 100 publishers before he found one that said yes. What's the important part of that story? He kept trying. I feel certain if he posted on the internet today (especially HN) "Hey everyone, I followed my dreams and got my quirky children's books published" with the advice of following your dreams, there would be a hundred comments saying "blah, blah, advising others to follow their dreams is all about Confirmation Bias." "Confirmation Bias" is just a convenient excuse the internet has when what they really mean to say is "What you're proposing is not without it's risks, and I'm too scared to take that risk."

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> What everyone seems to forget is the truth that a successful person is one who failed a lot and just tried one more time Consider, too, measuring every person based on their deviance from the norm. (For sake of argument, imagine a one-dimensional measure.) By definition, these would be the only people capable of shifting the norm. Ex ante it is impossible–based purely on consensus seeking–to discern the mad from the brilliant.
rocannon 8y ago
When looking at someone like Dr Seuss who kept trying after numerous failures, you also have to consider that there's an opportunity cost to doing what he did. Note: his story "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" was rejected 27 times before being accepted: https://www.npr.org/2012/01/24/145471724/how-dr-seuss-got-his-start-on-mulberry-street https://www.npr.org/2012/01/24/145471724/how-dr-seuss-got-hi... Maybe if he'd been rejected 100 times, it would have been worth thinking about trying something else? Also, if you follow the above link, you find that Dr Seuss admitted it was sheer luck that he got published. He was ready to give up! '"He bumped into a friend ... who had just become an editor at a publishing house in the children's section," McLain explains. Geisel told the friend that he'd simply given up and planned to destroy the book, but the editor asked to take a look... "He said if he had been walking down the other side of the street, he probably would never have become a children's author," McLain says.' I'm guessing, but I'd think that for most people, getting rejected after trying the _same thing_ 100 times probably means that your product is not good. So giving up after some reasonable number of tries, and pursuing _something else_, is often the better course. If you have nothing better to do, and don't mind failing in the end, then you can keep trying, too! The problem then is trying to figure out when to quit, and when to keep trying at the same thing. Some people have faith in themselves because they know that their product is great. But it's hard to tell the difference between justified self-confidence and unjustified self-delusion.

jondubois 8y ago

Maybe the author should write a follow-up article in a few years after a hotshot VC-backed startup or a large corporation starts competing with his product and destroys his company. If I was the author and I didn't have personal connections to tech elites, I would try to sell my business ASAP. Paradoxically though, not having those elite connections does make it harder to get your startup acquired.

jasonkester 8y ago
Does this concern come from experience? Or is it just your expectation of how the world works? I find it hard to believe that there are currently any hotshot VC-backed startups executing hard to crush a little $10k MRR market and push out the incumbent mom & pop SaaS currently occupying it. Every once in a while you'll see one of those shops get stepped on accidentally by a feature of a giant company. But I can't think of any examples of a "Show HN: My little bootstrapped thing that pays the rent" that was subsequently targeted for extermination.
- jondubois 8y ago
  It's from both personal experience and from discussions with others. It happened to me for every project that I've started. The first time was a drag-and-drop CMS; this industry quickly attracted several VC funded competitors and they were very fast in terms of development so I had no chance to compete on my own and so I gave up after 3 years. Second time was an open source project; a full stack Javascript framework. Competitors (MeteorJS and other smaller ones) also started spawning up and I was struggling to keep users so I extracted a small part of my project and spun it off as its own standalone open source product - That was maybe 1 or 2 years before MeteorJS decided to do something similar by spinning off Apollo. Thankfully MeteorJS spun off in a different direction than me so my project was able to survive and achieve linear growth year on year since. I have other stories from many colleagues I worked with over the years (as a contractor for many different companies) so I'm basically sure that what I'm saying is correct. I'm pretty sure that my social circle is an accurate representation of the 'typical developer/entrepreneur' as well; I'm pretty sure that this is the majority. Oh and trust me, a big company will take over this space eventually. Their product will do more and integrate better with other products.

hevi_jos 8y ago

From my point of view the biggest gift if your life if you want to make a business is not money, it is not connections, it is just mindset, and the emotional training of your parents. The most successful people I know in business have no formal education, no career. My super smart friends with PhDs and advanced degrees can't touch a business with a 100 meters stick. They work in places like Academia, constantly talking bad about it. They will be paralyzed at taking risks, handling this much responsibility over other people. The constant fight, people looking at you for guidance and having to decide with incomplete information,people not paying you, your salaries, your taxes... The anxiety they would face is too much for them. With all the money in the world, with all the connections it takes an entire emotional reprogramming of your mind to be able to handle this. I regularly see people with 100.000, 200.000 euros in the bank telling me they can't create the business they always dreamed about, if only they had enough money...the reality is that they are in doubt, insecure about risking their own money but somewhat they expect someone else to risk their own money trusting them when they can't even trust themselves.

cpkpad 8y ago
You have to look at the other side of the equation too: expenses and family structures. $200k euros in the bank is a ton if you're a single student. It's a very short runway if you have 6k/month in mortgage, 2k/month in childcare, car costs, educational debt, and so on. Unfortunately, most people don't have that type of savings until they're also saddled with obligations.
gammatrigono 8y ago
This is why investing is a thing for people at almost all levels. People with reasonable wealth but limited appetite for risk and effort can simply (through equity purchase) pay other people to be entrepreneurs for them, and both parties share in the rewards (or losses).

bobosha 8y ago

Survivorship bias is more apt here.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

I sometimes wonder if there is something genetic involved here. From an evolutionary perspective, a society full of 'leaders' is one that's going to collapse. You need a large proportion of followers to maintain social order. There was an interesting article a while back indicating that entrepreneurs were much more likely than average to have tried to sell things at an earlier age, taken on a job at an earlier age, and generally engage in a variety of atypical behavior from a very early age -- independent of class. Bezos, as an example, worked at McDonald's during one summer, hated it, and the next summer started a week long summer camp for kids -- with a whopping 6 signups for the first batch, but still probably earning more in that week than he did in the summer months at McDonalds -- certainly having more fun. Jack Ma is perhaps the most pure example of this phenomena. [1] But of course not everybody can do this. I mean they technically can, but neither the market nor society would be able to sustain itself if everybody decided to try to lead and create instead of follow and consume. Perhaps it sounds extreme, yet people regularly attribute vastly more esoteric notions, such as mastery of everything from board games to music, to genetic factors. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma

sbr464 8y ago

I can recommend his s3stat software. We used it to analyze thousands of devices that were uploading daily backups. It made it easy to see devices that had incorrect backup configs, for example, were uploading active .pst files from outlook etc, that changed daily (causing large continuous uploads) and other similar files. Also more active clients that allowed us to understand/handle pricing differently.

cortic 8y ago

The reason advice from successful entrepreneurs is generally considered worthless is because for every successful person there are thousands or millions of unsuccessful people who did exactly the same thing, worked just as hard and weren't successful. There is probably an equation here where; the number of simultaneous unsuccessful identical attempts is proportional to the magnitude of the success multiplied by the fame or notoriety of the successful. There is no magic recipe for success, and anyone trying to sell such a thing is trying to sell snake-oil, or trying to feel special. This depends of course on how you define success, as it applies to the above pseudo equation.

tondar 8y ago
Then I wonder about people who are trying to give advice about how to take advice from themselves because they claim they're successful. It seems like a rung beneath snake-oil.

hokus 8y ago

keep trying until the unfair advantages line up :P

cimmanom 8y ago
Most people don’t have the good fortune to be in a financial position to keep trying.

asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago

> You see, the biggest reason the business in question was successful was that our hero went out and built it. He actually tried. This is begging the question. That is exactly what people who make accusations of bias are contesting. (Although I'd say survivorship bias is probably the more appropriate choice.)

sfoblowsjose 8y ago

I've spent years living out of a backpack. Why is it cheap? It sucks. Southeast Asia is hot, humid and full of Western douchebags. Most whom are looking to explore their sexuality and ditch thier mommy issues. You can start a business but can't grow one from SE Asia. The author is right, anyone with two clients can do it. Good to see some enjoy living and working from nowhere.

gumboshoes 8y ago

In which the author condemns poor thinking and then commits his own in the form generalizations, cherry-picking, not-me-ism, and edge case selection.

lbj 8y ago

The zeitgeist is even worse than this post suggests. The common thread is that no-one can stand out. There are no exceptional executive's, the are "leaders who lead from behind". We see the horrible effects of this false humility most clearly in Elon Musk. Determined he was, to be the one suffering the most at Tesla - And the result is a man bearing all the markings of a mental breakdown, tearing the stock to bits with tweets that could only come from a man who's been suffering for far too long.

jadell 8y ago

It is survivorship bias when someone says "they're not lucky, they just kept trying and failing until they succeeded." The vast majority of people don't have the time/money/talent/resources to keep trying new ideas again and again until they succeed. There are many who use their life's savings, sacrifice their relationships, drain their personal health in pursuing an idea. Whether or not that idea is successful is dependent on many factors outside the person's control. The uniting factor is that if that one idea fails, that's it. That was that person's one shot, and now they've lost everything and have to go back to the grind. Being able to fail yet still having the resources try a dozen more ideas comes down to where you are starting from, and luck plays a huge role in that.

jasonkester 8y ago
That was that person's one shot The nice thing about our industry is that "shots" are essentially free. When domain names cost seven dollars and hosting is measured in pennies per month, you can try as many things as it takes until you find something that works. The only thing you risk is some nights and weekends. Here's Josh Pigford's list of the 50 failed business ideas he pursued in the 15 years before he found success with Baremetrics: https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1033032915175858176 https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/1033032915175858176
- pdimitar 8y ago
  No. You also need marketing, and that's very expensive. Especially if you don't have people to tell about your new project. > The only thing you risk is some nights and weekends. Are you familiar with the alien and unnatural concept of burnout? Or of being tired? It happens only to creatures on the other side of the galaxy but maybe you have heard of it?
- jadell 8y ago
  Anyone can throw up a marketing site with no actual product behind it to "gauge interest" in a weekend for a few dollars (though even a few dollars isn't trivial to everyone, so can't be assumed.) Marketing, actually building the thing, maintaining it long term, possibly quitting your job to pursue the idea. These things are hard and life-altering when you're living paycheck-to-paycheck (as the vast majority of Americans are), or on less than living wage, or potentially with a family to support or having a chronic medical condition to deal with. We can't assume everyone is in a situation that allows them unlimited nights and weekend time. It's also biased towards software companies; not every idea worth pursuing is in software. It takes time, money, and effort to build a company that makes tangible things.

hprotagonist 8y ago

Randy could see where it was going. Kivistik had gone for the usual academicians’s ace in the hole: everything is relative, it’s all just differing perspectives. People had already begun to resume their little side conversations, thinking that the conflict was over, when Randy gave them all a start with: “Who decides what’s bad? I do.” Even Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was flustered. He wasn’t sure if Randy was joking. “Excuse me?” Randy was in no great hurry to answer the question. He took the opportunity to sit back comfortably, stretch, and take a sip of his wine. He was feeling good. “It’s like this,” he said. “I’ve read your book. I’ve seen you on TV. I’ve heard you tonight. I personally typed up a list of your credentials when preparing press materials for this conference. So I know that you’re not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues.” “Oh,” Kivistik said in mock confusion, “I didn’t realize one had to have qualifications.” “I think it’s clear,” Randy said, “that if you are ignorant of a particular subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I’m sick, I don’t ask a plumber for advice. I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I have questions about the Internet, I will seek opinions from people who know about it.” “funny how all of the technocrats seem to be in favor of the Internet,” Kivistik said cheerily, milking a few more laughs from the crowd. “You have just made a statement that is demonstrably not true,” Randy said, pleasantly enough. “A number of Internet experts have written well-reasoned books that are sharply critical of it.” Kivistik was finally getting pissed off. All the levity was gone. “So,” Randy continued, “to get back to where we started, the Information Superhighway is a bad metaphor for the Internet, because I say it is. There might be a thousand people on the planet who are as conversant with the Internet as I am. I know most of these people. None of them takes that metaphor seriously. Q.E.D.” “Oh. I see,” Kivistik said, a little hotly. He had seen an opening. “So we should rely on the technocrats to tell us what to think, and how to think, about this technology.” The expressions of the others seemed to say that this was a telling blow, righteously struck. “I’m not sure what a technocrat is,” Randy said. “Am I a technocrat? I’m just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocal of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?” “You belonged to the technocratic elite even before you pick up that book,” Kivistik said. “The ability to wade through a technical text, and to understand it, is a privilege. It is a privilige conferred by an education that is available only to members of an elite class. That’s what I meant by a technocrat.” “I went to a public school,” Randy said. “And then I went to a state university. From that point on, I was self-educated.” Charlene broke in. [. . .] “And your family?” Charlene asked frostily. Randy took a deep breath, stifled the urge to sigh. “My father’s an engineer. He teaches at a state college.” “And his father?” “A mathemetician.” Charlene raised her eyebrows. So did nearly everyone else at the table. Case closed. “I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat,” Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person’s language[ . . .]. Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly, etiqutte dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed. Others gasped in outrage to hear these words coming from the lips of a known and convicted white male technocrat. “No one in my family has ever had much money or power,” he said. “I think the point that Charlene’s making is like this,” said Tomas, [. . .] “Just by virtue of coming from a scientific family, you are a member of a privileged elite. You’re not aware of it—but members of privileged elites are rarely aware of their privileges.” Randy finished the thought. “Until people like you come along to explain to us how stupid, to say nothing of morally bankrupt, we are.” “The false consiousness Tomas is speaking of is exactly what makes entrenched power elites so entrenched,” Charlene said. “Well, I don’t feel very entrenched,” Randy said. “I’ve worked my ass off to get where I’ve gotten.” “A lot of people work hard all their lives and get nowhere,” someone said accusingly. Look out! The sniping had begun. “Well, I’m sorry I haven’t had the good grace to get nowhere,” Randy said, now feeling just a bit surly for the first time, “but I have found that if you work hard, educate yourself, and keep your wits about you, you can find your way in this society.” “But that’s straight out of some nineteenth-century Horatio Alger book,” Thomas sputtered. “So? Just because it’s an old idea, doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” Randy said. 1999

pdimitar 8y ago

> The real reason you succeeded were all those unfair advantages that you had. Everything that you enumerated in this section is luck. Rich parents is not something you can work on, for example. > Worse, if you do manage to persuade these people that you were in fact not all that rich or successful when you started out, and that the only connections you have were even more broke than you, well, you still don't get to give advice. Broke connections > no connections. I have zero connections right now. I would have to pocket 5-digit sum for marketing expenses. If I want to start a business, I have nobody to say that to. Random internet strangers don't help. > And that's really all those "how I built an X" writeups are describing: Stop with the universal wisdom. It does not exist. Only thing I will grant you is -- you won't gain anything from luck if you don't show up. That's it. > Dismissing the author's wisdom and not trying to start a business will never, ever, in a million years, leave you with a successful business. Who said it will? WTF? > And if you keep trying, eventually you might be lucky enough to have some clown on the internet dismiss all your hard work as Confirmation Bias. Why do you care about "some clown on the internet"? You said you live comfortably off of the profits of one of your products. Go and enjoy your life and ignore people who obviously don't want to listen to you. Take the hint. > If you try something with a 10% chance of success enough times, eventually it will work. Think of it as Persistence Bias if you like, and it makes a lot more sense. Not all of us can try 50 times. Most of us cannot. If I try 2 or 3 times and fail, my savings are gone and I might actually have to live on the street. Thought of that? Thought of people who are already burned out from too many failures before? Yeah, "keep trying". Sure. When the only thing you want is some peace of mind and the world just to leave you the frak alone for 2 years but no, you have to try even harder now. A-ha. Your recipe of success via persistence is an eye-opener! Nobody ever thought of that before! > You see, the biggest reason the business in question was successful was that our hero went out and built it. He actually tried. True. If you never try, you will never succeed. Again though, many people cannot try 20+ times, or even 5. Don't forget that. Your post is a useless rant (like my reply here). People discard successful people advice because it's highly context-sensitive and includes a ton of factors that played in the favor of the said person. What worked for you might not work for many others -- and what did not work for you might work perfectly for me. This is universally true and it makes you an a-hole to dismiss it. All in all, a superfluous article which mostly makes you wonder why a successful person cares about what random people say. OP needs therapy sessions on self-worth.

RickJWagner 8y ago

At least in some circles, meritocracy seems to have a strong bearing on success. A good example is Linus Torvalds. He dreamed up Linux, which is an outside-the-park home run. Then he thought up Git, which is another runaway winner. As a programmer, I am happy with my own skill set. But I recognize that Linus plays in a whole other league. There are others that are likewise serial succeeders, and in different disciplines. P Diddy (nee Puff Daddy) is an example here. This guy just digs and digs until he succeeds. So I don't buy into the idea that external forces are the reason for others' successes. I just think some people are gifted and they exploit what they've got.