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Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. I followed most of the rise of Dota from trashy Warcraft 3 mod to Valve's multi-million-dollar-prize-

Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. I followed most of the rise of Dota from trashy Warcraft 3 mod to Valve's multi-million-dollar-prize-pool juggernaut. The first few crops of Dota millionaires all had the same backstory: "I played this game 14 hours a day. If there were tournaments at all they didn't really pay anything. My parents said I was wasting my life. I never had a girlfriend. Everyone thought I was a loser, but I just wanted to play and win... and now I know it was all worth it." And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision. Even if you could somehow know that competitive gaming would get big enough, and that your particular game would be popular enough, and that you could become good enough to win – that's just table stakes. You then have to actually play the game obsessively for a decade. There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life. It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions? Certainly not then, and definitely not now. Should you hope that your fringe interest (bus tickets, say) becomes a million-dollar enterprise? No, that's probably even less likely. Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests. A combination that is increasingly rare in an economic system designed to squeeze out the inefficient. Lest we forget the Bell monopoly; we may never see such inefficiency again.

lazyjones 7y ago
> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests. Where do you see that message? No luck was involved in your example, just hard work on behalf of the good players and of the Dota developers, and pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.
- glofish 7y ago
  In my interpretation of the reply, they were "lucky" in that the field took off and became economically viable to be good at it. Frankly, back 20 years ago I would have never thought that watching someone play a game would become a form of entertainment.
  - lazyjones 7y ago
    > Frankly, back 20 years ago I would have never thought that watching someone play a game would become a form of entertainment. Even after popular chess matches on TV in the 80's, 90's?
  - Swizec 7y ago
    > never thought that watching someone play a game would become a form of entertainment. Then what the hell are NFL, NBA, etc? People have been watching others play a game as a form of entertainment for as long as society can remember:
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  > ...pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational. To a point, yes. Though we may disagree on the threshold where it crosses over from rational to unhealthy obsession. And there is certainly luck involved when there are tens who found fortune out of millions participating.
- barrkel 7y ago
  The luck is that that game turned out to be lucrative.
  - lazyjones 7y ago
    Which highly competitive endeavours, that millions of young people spend many hours per week on, aren't?
    - dx87 7y ago
      Tons of other games didn't become big esports, and most of the people who dedicated years to those games ended up wasting their time.
      - lazyjones 7y ago
        > ended up wasting their time. So, did they play these games in the hope to make millions, or because they liked them?
- michaelbuckbee 7y ago
  The luck comes in that they opted to play Dota at just the right time. If someone had instead opted into becoming a really good Heroes of the Storm player (only to have the developer stop work on it) they would be in a really different position.
zhynn 7y ago
You could take this argument all the way down. Why did valve pick it up? I don't think they saw dota2 as a profit engine necessarily, though there is some argument for that. The company does tend to engage in bus ticket obsessions (VR, dota2). Sometimes it fails (artifact). But I strongly suspect that Gabe Newell bus tickets dota2. I would guess that like myself, he has no real skill at the game, but he just loves it. And he hired the guy (icefrog) that bus tickets dota2 mechanics. The combination is an enormously entertaining (for us fans) wildly unlikely tournament that has a 30 million dollar purse. Tarn and Zach Adams are also bus ticketers.
- immawizard 7y ago
  When valve picked up dota, league of legends was the most played multiplayer pc game in the world. I think it’s more likely that valve was afraid of exodus of pc gamers from their platform.
  - leoc 7y ago
    A bit of both. A group of people in Valve did become fascinated by Dota, though IIRC the leading figure was Robin Walker (of Team Fortress and Team Fortress 2 fame). That's why TF2 started sprouting MOBA-influenced weapons, for instance. But at the same time the business case for adopting Dota must have been quite clear, and surely was discussed seriously. (Valve also had plenty of experience in successfully bringing other people's existing games or mods in-house: TF and CS, Portal and Left 4 Dead.) Meanwhile Blizzard apparently continued to refuse all offers from the Dota developers.
astrodev 7y ago
> combination that is increasingly rare in an economic system designed to squeeze out the inefficient As a result, more and more areas of science and technology get stuck near local maxima. The same happened in all ancient civilisations.
keiferski 7y ago
Does being good at Dota count as being a genius? I think you are confusing financial success with contributing to artistic/scientific/intellectual progress.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Don't get hung up on the term genius, focus on the chance discovery part that is the actual topic of the article. Those first wave gaming professionals discovered a personal product market fit without trying, by being obsessed with an absurdly unprofitable pastime.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    The article title contains the word ‘genius’ and it’s about doing ‘great work’. The fact that some people managed to turn their consumption-based entertainment hobby into a financial success really has nothing to do with genius or great work.
galfarragem 7y ago
Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners. For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost. The truth in unconfortable and nobody wants to listen about it.
- astrodev 7y ago
  To be fair, Ronaldo is known for exceptional work ethic.
  - georgespencer 7y ago
    That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.
    - rhlsthrm 7y ago
      Yes, but work ethic and obsession are the absolute baseline you need.
      - malnourish 7y ago
        I think even that point is debatable depending on how you define success. If the definition of success is wealth or notoriety, there are certainly people who achieve it without those traits.
        icelancer 7y ago
        The fact that people become successful and/or notorious due to luck does not invalidate the fact that work ethic and your efforts play the largest controllable role you have. To focus on pure chance outcomes is unproductive and nonsensical.
      - pmoriarty 7y ago
friendlybus 7y ago
>It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions? If you told these guys to be a competitive gamer for the millions, they probably would have stuck to competitive fishing or whatever they were doing anyway. Taking a message or leadership from it is kind of the antithesis of the point. The point is that some social pursuits are the birthplace of the next big thing and some people who are focused on socializing need to make the choice on pursuits that have a potential and pursuits that don't like. Dance class is pretty dead as a career, but we're going to need people who can sort quality from quantity in a few years, the people focused on a qualitative pursuit socially need to pick a field where it's obvious that's needed like journalism or the swath of video games sure to flood the market. It doesn't have much to do with rational decision making in detail and is instead a generalized story about the different directions in life you can choose.
soneca 7y ago
> "pursue rationally unjustifiable interests" I disagree of how you define rationality here. If someone feels it serves them fine to play 14 hours of a game, it seems perfectly rational for me. Especially in the case that you mentioned, where they were playing before any big money was on the table. It means they liked, despite a lot of people judging them with an air of superiority.
- rapsey 7y ago
  It is objectively irrational. The ones who made a lot of money are 1%. The rest wasted their youth pursuing an impossible dream. They sacrificed their social development and their future job prospects.
  - soneca 7y ago
    No it is not. If someone is playing 14 hours of a game that is not even giving a lot of money (not even to any 1%, which is the initial situation mentioned before DOTA was big), then obviously they are not doing that for the money.
    - dx87 7y ago
      You'd be suprised. It's not uncommon to see players that only play that much because they want to become a pro player, but in the end they never make it, or qualify to 1-2 tournaments. The lucky ones end up making money from streaming, but a lot depend on their parents or girlfriend's for a place to live since they don't make enough money to live off of.
      - soneca 7y ago
        I think we are talking about two very different things. I am talking about bus ticket collectors and you are talking about gamers playing pro games giving millions of dollars in prizes. edit: I re-read my previous comment and I am not sure I could make it more clear. if a game does not gives money prizes at all, the ones who are playing it are not playing for the money.
vsareto 7y ago
>And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision. You have to weigh your current abilities and their earning potential vs. the costs of venturing into a new field. Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go, since Dota is a newer field. They aren't really comparable, but you still compare them if you are trying to figure out what you want to put your time into. Some people just get lucky and find the thing they are good at on the first try. Then they can maximize their hours available for that thing. Other people (probably the majority) have to try different fields and start later, and ultimately have less time overall to spend. So it actually seems rational (if maximizing hours-spent is your goal) to go all-in on the first thing that grabs your interest, which could be Dota.
- taurath 7y ago
  > Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go I slightly disagree - neither Chess nor Go have nearly the millions of new players playing it obsessively as they come of age. Math is a bit different, but often times “good at math” isn’t very rewarding except as it pertains to an ancillary job, or if you’re one of the relative few who become a math major. There’s also a major drop off over time with MOBA players - the average age is 22 or something for professionals. Eventually the reflexes get worse.
  - VladimirIvanov 7y ago
    I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Being a top chess or go player in modern times necessitates being a child prodigy. The skill gap in chess and go is enormous. I don't think the number of players is the primary indicator of how difficult it is to be at the "top" of an activity.
foogazi 7y ago
Chance favors the prepared mind I guess They played the game they loved and they loved to win at it When money arrived into e-games they were most prepared I don’t like competitive gaming so even if you tell me there are millions to be made I still won’t do it, it seems something so unattainable
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
Yeah, for reference, even mid-level people at FAANG in basically any field can make $1M in 2-3 years. I think most people have no idea how much some laborers can make in the US. Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a genius to work in FAANG. It's a lot of luck. You just have to give yourself as many good chances in the interview pipeline as possible.
Alex3917 7y ago
> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. Anything competitive is emphatically not a good example of this. If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life. Competition can be great for cultivating positive character traits and developing certain skills, but at some point you need to move beyond it.
- wtvanhest 7y ago
  Competitive gaming was an extreme niche 20 years ago. Now its just a niche with lots of people. When these people started, the concept of competitive gaming didnt even really exist.
- sanderjd 7y ago
  You're eliminating a big category of things most people recognize as genius here. There's a long history of recognized genius in the development of chess and go over time for instance. You may not consider this as meaningful as breakthroughs in physics and biology for instance (and I may agree), but I think it leaves out a pretty big part of our history to discount this altogether.
- jstummbillig 7y ago
  It might just be a matter of framing, but I do not understand: How could you ever do anything work related, void of competition for any significant stretch of time? Even if you create or exploit something wildly new that is completely beyond reach for anyone else at that moment – let's say you made time travel viable tomorrow – as soon as you did and started commercialising it, competition would start forming later that day. For everything else, you will right off the gate be competing with someone over something (at the very least time and money). Airbnb is competing with Hotels/Motels, Uber with Taxis, Facebook with MySpace. MySpace with more specialised communities and GeoCities. The internet was competing with telephones, mail, fax and the yellow pages. Can you elaborate?
- stickfigure 7y ago
  Interesting perspective! I guess the rebuttal might go something like: Business is inherently competitive. Creating startups, you are usually competing not only with old line businesses but with other startups. I guess the rebuttal to the rebuttal might sound something like Thiel's startup lectures: Startups should try to be anticompetitive, ideally carving out new niches. You don't want to engage in head-to-head competition. The 3rd degree rebuttal might be something like: There are plenty of examples of successful startups that began as clones of other businesses (Facebook seems the canonical example). But then as you say, they moved beyond being a clone of Friendster/Myspace/Tribe/etc... but isn't that the competitive process?
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests Nah, millions are delivered to those who already have millions, everything else is noise that is overemphasized to distract the bottom 80+%.
- smallnamespace 7y ago
  It might be worthwhile to remind ourselves here that making lots of money, acquiring status, and gaining power are obsessive interests that some people have.
wincy 7y ago
It’s a confirmation bias. I have a similar story. I dropped out of school at 16, and spent 14+ hours a day playing Stepmania Online, which was Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. I was one of the best in the world! Then everyone stopped playing and nothing came of it. So for every DOTA millionaire or whatnot there’s likely thousands of people who are obsessed with something equally niche who haven’t realized any financial gains because of it. Now I’m a software engineer, it’s working out way better than playing video games all day.
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  Ah, Stepmania Online...what a fun time that was. I remember putting in my 6-8 a day after school. I may not have been at the level you were at but I was roughly the same age and quite good. Then, I went to college and no longer had the same desire to play anymore. Do you still crack open Stepmania every so often for old times sake? I have no idea if any kind of a community still exists around it.
  - wincy 7y ago
    Hah I haven’t for a couple years but last time I did I was amazed and dismayed at having the sensation that my mind knows what to do, but my fingers just aren’t quick enough. I’d guess if you were a musician or athlete who hadn’t played in awhile it’d feel similar. I end up shutting it off because my brain isn’t entertained by the slow songs and my hands can’t physically keep up with the fast ones that I loved so much, and it’d probably take me a few weeks to get any good again and I’m not willing to put in that kind of time with a family. It also gave me a lesson in hierarchies of competence. Even though I was maybe one of the 20 best people ranked in Stepmania Online, there were people who despite the amount of time I’d put in were significantly better at the game. (The name Nima comes to mind, I think he was a concert pianist whose skills translated into perfect accuracy on Stepmania). Despite being really good, I felt like I’d never be the best. It was also around that time that I met Day9, the pro Starcraft now relatively famous Twitch streamer at a LAN party and he introduced me to Beatmania, which was like Stepmania only more keys. He was so good at it (and arrogant, hah but isn’t any sixteen year old that can be?) that I sort of gave up on Stepmania because it felt like peanuts in comparison.
tomxor 7y ago
> There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life. Not everything is about ROI, I'm also not saying playing Dota for your entire life is going to be particularly fulfilling in many other ways thought - after all they are playing out their lives within the very finite confines of someone else's creation. The author does point this out as a suggested heuristic, if you are obsessed with someone elses creation, it's probably not going to be very fruitful (whether fruitful means money, scientific discovery, or fulfillment ones curiosity etc).
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this >> it's more promising if you're creating something, rather than just consuming something someone else creates Gaming consumes the creative efforts of others. It's fun, invigorating and a healthy pass-time. But it's not good ground for growing genius.

lazyjones 7y ago

> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests. Where do you see that message? No luck was involved in your example, just hard work on behalf of the good players and of the Dota developers, and pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.

glofish 7y ago
In my interpretation of the reply, they were "lucky" in that the field took off and became economically viable to be good at it. Frankly, back 20 years ago I would have never thought that watching someone play a game would become a form of entertainment.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > Frankly, back 20 years ago I would have never thought that watching someone play a game would become a form of entertainment. Even after popular chess matches on TV in the 80's, 90's?
- Swizec 7y ago
  > never thought that watching someone play a game would become a form of entertainment. Then what the hell are NFL, NBA, etc? People have been watching others play a game as a form of entertainment for as long as society can remember:
paulryanrogers 7y ago
> ...pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational. To a point, yes. Though we may disagree on the threshold where it crosses over from rational to unhealthy obsession. And there is certainly luck involved when there are tens who found fortune out of millions participating.
barrkel 7y ago
The luck is that that game turned out to be lucrative.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  Which highly competitive endeavours, that millions of young people spend many hours per week on, aren't?
  - dx87 7y ago
    Tons of other games didn't become big esports, and most of the people who dedicated years to those games ended up wasting their time.
    - lazyjones 7y ago
      > ended up wasting their time. So, did they play these games in the hope to make millions, or because they liked them?
michaelbuckbee 7y ago
The luck comes in that they opted to play Dota at just the right time. If someone had instead opted into becoming a really good Heroes of the Storm player (only to have the developer stop work on it) they would be in a really different position.

zhynn 7y ago

You could take this argument all the way down. Why did valve pick it up? I don't think they saw dota2 as a profit engine necessarily, though there is some argument for that. The company does tend to engage in bus ticket obsessions (VR, dota2). Sometimes it fails (artifact). But I strongly suspect that Gabe Newell bus tickets dota2. I would guess that like myself, he has no real skill at the game, but he just loves it. And he hired the guy (icefrog) that bus tickets dota2 mechanics. The combination is an enormously entertaining (for us fans) wildly unlikely tournament that has a 30 million dollar purse. Tarn and Zach Adams are also bus ticketers.

immawizard 7y ago
When valve picked up dota, league of legends was the most played multiplayer pc game in the world. I think it’s more likely that valve was afraid of exodus of pc gamers from their platform.
- leoc 7y ago
  A bit of both. A group of people in Valve did become fascinated by Dota, though IIRC the leading figure was Robin Walker (of Team Fortress and Team Fortress 2 fame). That's why TF2 started sprouting MOBA-influenced weapons, for instance. But at the same time the business case for adopting Dota must have been quite clear, and surely was discussed seriously. (Valve also had plenty of experience in successfully bringing other people's existing games or mods in-house: TF and CS, Portal and Left 4 Dead.) Meanwhile Blizzard apparently continued to refuse all offers from the Dota developers.

astrodev 7y ago

> combination that is increasingly rare in an economic system designed to squeeze out the inefficient As a result, more and more areas of science and technology get stuck near local maxima. The same happened in all ancient civilisations.

keiferski 7y ago

Does being good at Dota count as being a genius? I think you are confusing financial success with contributing to artistic/scientific/intellectual progress.

usrusr 7y ago
Don't get hung up on the term genius, focus on the chance discovery part that is the actual topic of the article. Those first wave gaming professionals discovered a personal product market fit without trying, by being obsessed with an absurdly unprofitable pastime.
- keiferski 7y ago
  The article title contains the word ‘genius’ and it’s about doing ‘great work’. The fact that some people managed to turn their consumption-based entertainment hobby into a financial success really has nothing to do with genius or great work.

galfarragem 7y ago

Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners. For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost. The truth in unconfortable and nobody wants to listen about it.

astrodev 7y ago
To be fair, Ronaldo is known for exceptional work ethic.
- georgespencer 7y ago
  That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.
  - rhlsthrm 7y ago
    Yes, but work ethic and obsession are the absolute baseline you need.
    - malnourish 7y ago
      I think even that point is debatable depending on how you define success. If the definition of success is wealth or notoriety, there are certainly people who achieve it without those traits.
      - icelancer 7y ago
        The fact that people become successful and/or notorious due to luck does not invalidate the fact that work ethic and your efforts play the largest controllable role you have. To focus on pure chance outcomes is unproductive and nonsensical.
    - pmoriarty 7y ago

friendlybus 7y ago

>It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions? If you told these guys to be a competitive gamer for the millions, they probably would have stuck to competitive fishing or whatever they were doing anyway. Taking a message or leadership from it is kind of the antithesis of the point. The point is that some social pursuits are the birthplace of the next big thing and some people who are focused on socializing need to make the choice on pursuits that have a potential and pursuits that don't like. Dance class is pretty dead as a career, but we're going to need people who can sort quality from quantity in a few years, the people focused on a qualitative pursuit socially need to pick a field where it's obvious that's needed like journalism or the swath of video games sure to flood the market. It doesn't have much to do with rational decision making in detail and is instead a generalized story about the different directions in life you can choose.

soneca 7y ago

> "pursue rationally unjustifiable interests" I disagree of how you define rationality here. If someone feels it serves them fine to play 14 hours of a game, it seems perfectly rational for me. Especially in the case that you mentioned, where they were playing before any big money was on the table. It means they liked, despite a lot of people judging them with an air of superiority.

rapsey 7y ago
It is objectively irrational. The ones who made a lot of money are 1%. The rest wasted their youth pursuing an impossible dream. They sacrificed their social development and their future job prospects.
- soneca 7y ago
  No it is not. If someone is playing 14 hours of a game that is not even giving a lot of money (not even to any 1%, which is the initial situation mentioned before DOTA was big), then obviously they are not doing that for the money.
  - dx87 7y ago
    You'd be suprised. It's not uncommon to see players that only play that much because they want to become a pro player, but in the end they never make it, or qualify to 1-2 tournaments. The lucky ones end up making money from streaming, but a lot depend on their parents or girlfriend's for a place to live since they don't make enough money to live off of.
    - soneca 7y ago
      I think we are talking about two very different things. I am talking about bus ticket collectors and you are talking about gamers playing pro games giving millions of dollars in prizes. edit: I re-read my previous comment and I am not sure I could make it more clear. if a game does not gives money prizes at all, the ones who are playing it are not playing for the money.

vsareto 7y ago

>And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision. You have to weigh your current abilities and their earning potential vs. the costs of venturing into a new field. Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go, since Dota is a newer field. They aren't really comparable, but you still compare them if you are trying to figure out what you want to put your time into. Some people just get lucky and find the thing they are good at on the first try. Then they can maximize their hours available for that thing. Other people (probably the majority) have to try different fields and start later, and ultimately have less time overall to spend. So it actually seems rational (if maximizing hours-spent is your goal) to go all-in on the first thing that grabs your interest, which could be Dota.

taurath 7y ago
> Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go I slightly disagree - neither Chess nor Go have nearly the millions of new players playing it obsessively as they come of age. Math is a bit different, but often times “good at math” isn’t very rewarding except as it pertains to an ancillary job, or if you’re one of the relative few who become a math major. There’s also a major drop off over time with MOBA players - the average age is 22 or something for professionals. Eventually the reflexes get worse.
- VladimirIvanov 7y ago
  I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Being a top chess or go player in modern times necessitates being a child prodigy. The skill gap in chess and go is enormous. I don't think the number of players is the primary indicator of how difficult it is to be at the "top" of an activity.

foogazi 7y ago

Chance favors the prepared mind I guess They played the game they loved and they loved to win at it When money arrived into e-games they were most prepared I don’t like competitive gaming so even if you tell me there are millions to be made I still won’t do it, it seems something so unattainable

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

Yeah, for reference, even mid-level people at FAANG in basically any field can make $1M in 2-3 years. I think most people have no idea how much some laborers can make in the US. Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a genius to work in FAANG. It's a lot of luck. You just have to give yourself as many good chances in the interview pipeline as possible.

Alex3917 7y ago

> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. Anything competitive is emphatically not a good example of this. If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life. Competition can be great for cultivating positive character traits and developing certain skills, but at some point you need to move beyond it.

wtvanhest 7y ago
Competitive gaming was an extreme niche 20 years ago. Now its just a niche with lots of people. When these people started, the concept of competitive gaming didnt even really exist.
sanderjd 7y ago
You're eliminating a big category of things most people recognize as genius here. There's a long history of recognized genius in the development of chess and go over time for instance. You may not consider this as meaningful as breakthroughs in physics and biology for instance (and I may agree), but I think it leaves out a pretty big part of our history to discount this altogether.
jstummbillig 7y ago
It might just be a matter of framing, but I do not understand: How could you ever do anything work related, void of competition for any significant stretch of time? Even if you create or exploit something wildly new that is completely beyond reach for anyone else at that moment – let's say you made time travel viable tomorrow – as soon as you did and started commercialising it, competition would start forming later that day. For everything else, you will right off the gate be competing with someone over something (at the very least time and money). Airbnb is competing with Hotels/Motels, Uber with Taxis, Facebook with MySpace. MySpace with more specialised communities and GeoCities. The internet was competing with telephones, mail, fax and the yellow pages. Can you elaborate?
stickfigure 7y ago
Interesting perspective! I guess the rebuttal might go something like: Business is inherently competitive. Creating startups, you are usually competing not only with old line businesses but with other startups. I guess the rebuttal to the rebuttal might sound something like Thiel's startup lectures: Startups should try to be anticompetitive, ideally carving out new niches. You don't want to engage in head-to-head competition. The 3rd degree rebuttal might be something like: There are plenty of examples of successful startups that began as clones of other businesses (Facebook seems the canonical example). But then as you say, they moved beyond being a clone of Friendster/Myspace/Tribe/etc... but isn't that the competitive process?

dragonwriter 7y ago

> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests Nah, millions are delivered to those who already have millions, everything else is noise that is overemphasized to distract the bottom 80+%.

smallnamespace 7y ago
It might be worthwhile to remind ourselves here that making lots of money, acquiring status, and gaining power are obsessive interests that some people have.

wincy 7y ago

It’s a confirmation bias. I have a similar story. I dropped out of school at 16, and spent 14+ hours a day playing Stepmania Online, which was Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. I was one of the best in the world! Then everyone stopped playing and nothing came of it. So for every DOTA millionaire or whatnot there’s likely thousands of people who are obsessed with something equally niche who haven’t realized any financial gains because of it. Now I’m a software engineer, it’s working out way better than playing video games all day.

yowlingcat 7y ago
Ah, Stepmania Online...what a fun time that was. I remember putting in my 6-8 a day after school. I may not have been at the level you were at but I was roughly the same age and quite good. Then, I went to college and no longer had the same desire to play anymore. Do you still crack open Stepmania every so often for old times sake? I have no idea if any kind of a community still exists around it.
- wincy 7y ago
  Hah I haven’t for a couple years but last time I did I was amazed and dismayed at having the sensation that my mind knows what to do, but my fingers just aren’t quick enough. I’d guess if you were a musician or athlete who hadn’t played in awhile it’d feel similar. I end up shutting it off because my brain isn’t entertained by the slow songs and my hands can’t physically keep up with the fast ones that I loved so much, and it’d probably take me a few weeks to get any good again and I’m not willing to put in that kind of time with a family. It also gave me a lesson in hierarchies of competence. Even though I was maybe one of the 20 best people ranked in Stepmania Online, there were people who despite the amount of time I’d put in were significantly better at the game. (The name Nima comes to mind, I think he was a concert pianist whose skills translated into perfect accuracy on Stepmania). Despite being really good, I felt like I’d never be the best. It was also around that time that I met Day9, the pro Starcraft now relatively famous Twitch streamer at a LAN party and he introduced me to Beatmania, which was like Stepmania only more keys. He was so good at it (and arrogant, hah but isn’t any sixteen year old that can be?) that I sort of gave up on Stepmania because it felt like peanuts in comparison.

tomxor 7y ago

> There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life. Not everything is about ROI, I'm also not saying playing Dota for your entire life is going to be particularly fulfilling in many other ways thought - after all they are playing out their lives within the very finite confines of someone else's creation. The author does point this out as a suggested heuristic, if you are obsessed with someone elses creation, it's probably not going to be very fruitful (whether fruitful means money, scientific discovery, or fulfillment ones curiosity etc).

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this >> it's more promising if you're creating something, rather than just consuming something someone else creates Gaming consumes the creative efforts of others. It's fun, invigorating and a healthy pass-time. But it's not good ground for growing genius.