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Excellence awards you the choice of being an asshole. It also allows you to be revisionist in excusing you being an asshole as necessary in retrospect, even if

• base698 6y ago
  I wonder. You look at someone like Linus that has created untold trillions of wealth and given a lot of that wealth away. Yet, there are also many very public asshole blow ups. Are there counter examples of success like that which don't have a severe asshole at the epicenter? Carmack and Tim Sweeney?
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    Torvalds's "public blow ups" are not really about being an asshole though, it's just a playful style of communication. Maybe it shows more confidence and assertiveness, but that's not a bad thing.
    • shadowgovt 6y ago
      The problem is it really doesn't read that way in text to a lot of readers (I also suspect there's a culture gap; there's a stereotype about Scandinavian communication being gruff and blunt relative to other European customs).
    • tachyonbeam 6y ago
      I don't know about that. He's said some incredibly mean and offensive things. It is detrimental IMO. There is basically no way I would want to collaborate with him. You couldn't pay me to contribute to the Linux kernel, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way. He gets away with it because the world has become very dependent on Linux.
      • shadowgovt 6y ago
        And it isn't just him. His approach normalized that interaction approach in people who work on the Linux kernel and adjacent projects, and creates a whole field of people potential collaborators don't want to interact with. I got put off trying to improve Linux very early on when I tried to get help with a simple configuration issue in IRC and instead got dragged into a tedious debate about whether it's okay to call the OS "Linux" or "GNU/Linux." Ain't nobody got time for that. Not when there is a whole world of other projects one can choose to donate one's time to.
        • Daishiman 6y ago
          To be far, the "GNU/Linux" thing is a Stallmanism that is the exact opposite of Linus, who's pretty much the antithesis of pedantry.
      • zozbot234 6y ago
        His thing is being "mean and offensive" to the inner circle of kernel maintainers, not to random contributors. It's all about not being collectively wishy-washy, and making it clear what is expected of that inner circle. Some people might call it a bit unprofessional and be bothered by that kind of style, but many are clearly fine with it.
        • LiquidSky 6y ago
          But that's the classic defense for asshole behavior in the workplace (or, in this case, the collaborative space). Are many "clear fine with it", or is it just accepted as what you had to put up with to operate in that space? And, as the center of that space, was Linus's behavior and attitude setting expectations about how people should act if they wanted to participate, and consequently what people just had to deal with as "the culture"? To go back to Jobs, obviously many people worked with him and he had his inner circle. Was everyone fine with him being an asshole, or did they just put up with it because he's the boss and that's what you had to deal with if you wanted to work at Apple?
        • mcguire 6y ago
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    Steve Wozniak is absolutely brilliant and one of the most jovial souls a person will meet.
    • logfromblammo 6y ago
      A guy like that, you wonder how he can even poop, not having a gram of asshole in his whole body. Clearly, you don't need to be an asshole to be successful. But do you have to be near one? When Jobs was right there next to him, his body 8% anus by mass, being asshole enough for ten ordinary men, how do we know whether Woz's success was due in part to Jobs' abrasive personality, or in spite of it? Didn't Jobs pull some dirty business tricks to cheat Woz out of some of his ownership?
      • pmiller2 6y ago
        > A guy like that, you wonder how he can even poop, not having a gram of asshole in his whole body. [...] > When Jobs was right there next to him, his body 8% anus by mass, being asshole enough for ten ordinary men Normally, I wouldn't comment on something like this, but this phrasing is pure gold.
      • _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
        > how do we know whether Woz's success was due in part to Jobs' abrasive personality, or in spite of it? Didn't Jobs pull some dirty business tricks to cheat Woz out of some of his ownership? There are a number of stories where it generally sounds like Jobs knew how to take advantage of Wozniak, e.g.: "...The original deadline was met after Wozniak worked at Atari four nights straight, doing some additional designs while at his day job at Hewlett-Packard. This equated to a bonus of $5,000, which Jobs kept secret from Wozniak. Wozniak has stated he only received payment of $350..." [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game) ]
  • LiquidSky 6y ago
    >You look at someone like Linus that has created untold trillions of wealth and given a lot of that wealth away. That isn't incompatible with being an asshole. The open source community is famous for having many...let's say "abrasive" personalities. Different people value different things, and for some people that might not be money, but they can still be awful jerks.
  • hindsightbias 6y ago
    > Carmack If you can look past the sweatshop work environment.
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  Steve Jobs was famously an asshole. Everyone remembers how he pushed Apple towards success when he returned, but lots of people seem to forget there's a reason his own company canned him in the first place. One wonders whether Apple would be even further along if he hadn't been so unlikable the board ousted him.
  • Someone1234 6y ago
    This is a little revisionist. They ousted him because he was costing too much money and not delivering (or likely to deliver) results (vis-a-vis Macintosh). Nobody in a position to fire Jobs cared that he treated employees like dirt, and that isn't anyone's version of the story. What they cared about that he was producing a competing product to the Apple II line which was the company's bread and butter at the time, that would be too expensive for the markets they were targeting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#Macintosh_and_the_%221984%22_commercial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#Macintos...
    • shadowgovt 6y ago
      That's definitely half of it. But companies are sometimes willing to work with someone who has a bad idea but is a good person. When they're costing the company millions and are also an asshole, canning them isn't a hard call.
    • leoc 6y ago
      It seems clear (not an expert) that Jobs wasn't fired because the Mac was unpopular at Apple. It seems the main thing that got him fired was, roughly, an internal conflict about what the next step after Macintosh should be: the Macintosh II Apple actually shipped, or something like the NeXT https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-precursor-mac-ii-next-cube/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec... . (The Macintosh IIs were very expensive, easily in the same ballpark as a NeXT Cube system, and very profitable for Apple.) There was certainly also personal ill-will between Jobs and Scully and maybe some other senior people, and likely also a lack of trust in his project management. But yes, all this probably had relatively little to do with his behaviour towards subordinates. It may in fact be the case that Jobs' became more caustic towards subordinates at NeXT than he had usually been in his first time at Apple.
• deleted 6y ago
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• tachyonbeam 6y ago
  I've personally known a very famous professor I won't name. I met him back in 2010. He was already successful, but friendly. He's since become 50x more famous and more successful, and I honestly feel like his ego has inflated to match that. He's now more abrasive, interrupts people more, is more dismissive of other people's ideas. He's trying to be everywhere at once to maintain his success, filling his days with meetings and talks, from 8AM to 6PM, but failing to keep up IMO (because nobody can do everything and succeed, you have to choose some things and stay focused). In contrast, I've met other very successful profs from other universities. Had a meeting with someone who is probably the top guy in his field. I felt like a total impostor, but he listened to everything I had to say, was kind and patient, showed genuine interest. I was really impressed. There really are highly successful people who are not assholes.. And IMO, the successful-but-kind prof is still publishing a lot of genuinely innovative papers, maybe because he's open to learning from others around him. Whereas the successful-but-arrogant guy who's trying to be everywhere has become out of touch and is coasting on his existing fame, but not contributing much anymore.
  • l33tbro 6y ago
    I think consummated talent yields entitlement. Worse yet, talented individuals quickly lose credibility when Dunning and Kruger become chaperones. For all its protestant affectation, humility is very useful.
• lucideer 6y ago
  Disclaimer: my entire comment below hinges on very subjective definitions of the word "success". Take with liberal pinches of salt. > Excellence awards you the choice of being an asshole. I would go a little further here and say personal/individual "success" affords you the choice of being an asshole. Excellence is not always a requirement for personal/individual success, as personal/individual success is not always equivalent to holistic success (i.e. success of a company/product/idea as a whole). > Some people will be assholes if allowed to, but I don't think it's (positively) correlated with success. There are levels of both (assholery and success), but I would guess there's at least some correlation purely because a level of assholery is often (not always) required to overcome certain hurdles on the road to that success. My point being that being an asshole may disimprove results for colleagues & collaborators, but may improve results when dealing with more oppositional / competitive situations.
• CM30 6y ago
  Yeah, this is pretty much it in a nutshell. An asshole who's brilliantly talented in some field can do well in that field, because their talent makes them valuable even if their personality drives people away. There are plenty of jerks out there who aren't particularly talented at whatever their chosen field or profession is, but you don't hear about them because they don't become famous or (in a lot of cases), get hired at all. It reminds me of this quote from The Simpsons: >Aide: Sir, I'm afraid you've gone mad with power. >Russ Cargill: Of course I have! Have you ever tried going mad without power? It's boring. Nobody listens to you. Same deal with jerks and success. A talented jerk will get listened to and became famous in spite of their toxic personality, an untalented one will go ignored and quickly get forgotten about.