13 ms·

Early Work

577 points by harscoat 6y ago

nikivi 6y ago
I think removing frictions from starting new things & automating the mundane things like project setup, doc setup etc. goes along way to cross the bridge from 'wanting to build something' to 'building it'. As well as ability to track things being worked on sorted by priority. I currently do that part in Notion. (https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/ideas https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/ideas) Working in public on anything is very useful too as there is a long time inbetween making something and 'truly releasing' something. I remember the talk on how https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent started off as a simple readme. Got lots of interest & comments and only then was the idea validated and got built on, already with community. Here is the great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqnvKP1DYRI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqnvKP1DYRI
- jacobush 6y ago
  It can also be a great distraction to fiddle around with the supporting tools instead of the thing itself.
  - TacoSteemers 6y ago
    Fiddling around can also be okay, if it is relaxing.
  - nikivi 6y ago
    True but the project templates is a solved problem. I haven't chosen one I liked yet but here are some options: https://www.notion.so/nikitavoloboev/Project-generator-3cd7414001cb4c4d8c2df38dfe41ed41 https://www.notion.so/nikitavoloboev/Project-generator-3cd74...
  - rraghur 6y ago
    This is unfortunately, me.. I've slowly come to the conclusion of not using to avoid it completely (that's to hard), but rather timebox it when i catch myself drifting
curiousllama 6y ago
> Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem clever. It's ~100x harder to create than critique. I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?" People will freely tell you the latter, but rarely the former.
- tcgv 6y ago
  That's my standard approach to work, I always try to invalidate an idea before investing my time (or the team's time) in it. If we can't invalidate the idea I feel much more confident that we're going in the right direction. On the other hand a lot of people spend too much energy trying to support the idea, which often is a reflection of confirmation bias / wishful thinking in their thought process.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    Invalidating an idea is a bad idea because old ideas are bad until they’re suddenly very good. For example, before Napoleon, cannons were often a terrible idea: unreliable and rarely decisive. Then the technology caught up to the idea.
    - username90 6y ago
      Which is why it is good to know why things are bad so you know when they no longer applies. If you just try to be positive then you'd try to use cannons when they were still not good enough to be practical on the field.
      - sillysaurusx 6y ago
        In theory yes, but it often takes a believer to push through the naysayers. Facebook seemed a terrible idea when it first came out. Ditto for Airbnb.
        6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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bob33212 6y ago
Humans naturally think linearly. This is because our lizard brains have evolved over millions of years in environment where linear processes were the most important to understand for survival. When we see a lion that is 1 mile away we know that we have 2x the time to run away than when the lion is .5 miles away. So when we see a crappy project that took a few months to create, we naturally assume that it will be slightly less crappy in a few more months. We can't even imagine what it would look like if it was 100x more useful in 9 months. Even PG and other great early investors only have a slight notion of what that would look like.
- carterklein13 6y ago
  I have to disagree - I feel like most successful investors explicitly look for ideas that can grow in the exponential fashion you describe. YC particularly doesn't seem to show any interest towards linearly-scalable businesses AFAIK. EDIT: Or, rather, I agree with the point you're making, but I think it's pretty commonly-held belief.
Mizza 6y ago
Obligatory Ira Glass quote: “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
- blakesmith 6y ago
  This article reminded me of the same quote! Here's the original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE
- cyberdrunk 6y ago
  It's missing the bit where he explains that doing good work is in many fields (in precisely the ones that people are attracted to) is not enough to sustain yourself. You need to be super good or be lucky, have connections or some other form advantage.
- HorizonXP 6y ago
  I got put onto this quote/video by @garry here on HN, when he included it in his most recent YouTube video where he discusses how he made his channel grow & be successful. It's definitely something I've struggled with for a long time, and I wish I had found it sooner.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
Why do certain days seem better suited to doing good work? Most days, I feel like doing nothing. But some days, the computer calls to me, and it would be foolish to ignore it. If I’ve done anything impressive, it’s during those days. But why? And can those days be maximized? Is it strictly a product of one’s environment? It can’t be; the institute for advanced study showed that you can have a perfect environment but make no progress.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  What's the perfect environment?
  - martin_a 6y ago
    That differs from person to person and you'll have to find out for yourself. I enjoy the late afternoon hours when most of my colleagues are already gone, the phone rings not as often and I can put some music on headphones. Takes me about 15 minutes till I get into the flow state and am highly productive.
    - tartoran 6y ago
      Likewise and I have to add that mornings I am usually not very productive anyway, regardless of the environment. I've been working from home for the past few Covid months and the bulk of my work is done in the afternoon. That's not very convenient for me as I'd like to enjoy my time off after 5, but I usually end up past that to take advantage of the momentum built.
- ackbar03 6y ago
  Seems like a strange comment for the article but since you made it, For me its not that I don't feel like doing work on most days. Instead I have periods where I am super uber productive and days where I feel completely exhausted. I can't tell if its a mental thing or rather there's actually something physically wrong Lol. My mind tends to be blurry like its rebelling and if I force myself to work hard I start feeling feverish. I have trouble figuring out if I'm not working hard enough or working too hard. I wonder if its also like that for some of the successful startup founders out there too
Hongwei 6y ago
I've always told people interested in startup to "start a project, not a company." I haven't been able to verbalize why yet until this: But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.
- povik 6y ago
  How can you know that such an impulse is part of some country’s national culture? I sometimes think about what sets successful and less successful countries apart, and how profound an effect can cultures have. Assuming that smart people are born everywhere at similar rate, and disregarding unfree societies with authoritative regimes or paralysing religious dogmas, I would naively expect similar outcomes among countries. I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture, but I guess I will never know.
  - Kluny 6y ago
    In Denmark it's so prevalent that it's codified as Jante's Law. It's not a prescriptive law, despite the way it's phrased. It's more descriptive, a satirical summary of the way Danes think of ambitious people. - You're not to think you are anything special. - You're not to think you are as good as we are. - You're not to think you are smarter than we are. - You're not to imagine yourself better than we are. - You're not to think you know more than we do. - You're not to think you are more important than we are. - You're not to think you are good at anything. - You're not to laugh at us. - You're not to think anyone cares about you. - You're not to think you can teach us anything.
    - abhayhegde 6y ago
      I may be misinterpreting it here. Although a few points (see point no. 6, 8, 9) help one stay grounded and humble, the other points can be seen as degrading the self-worth of an ambitious person.
Sodman 6y ago
Has paulgraham.com never had TLS or is it just more obvious now because of Chrome UI changes? I find the old-school style & minimalism helps focus on the content, but shouldn't he at least have a LetsEncrypt cert up there or something? Or is the argument that because the site has no interactivity, it's not a big deal?
- snazz 6y ago
  It has a TLS certificate for the Yahoo Store domain if you browse to the https:// https:// version, but I agree that PG should add something easy like Let's Encrypt or put it behind Cloudflare. It's been "modernized" with a mobile version already, so I think that HTTPS is a good next step. It can't hurt, at least.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  What would you, as a user, gain from the site being https? Do you ever share confidential data with the site?
jasim 6y ago
There are two places where it is possible to see early, "lame" work. One is YouTube - most channels with well-made videos would retain their earliest works, and the first few dozen can be quite instructive. Second is GitHub - the first few hundred commits of many successful open-source projects. It is a wonder to see sprawling codebases starting at its first commit, and plodding its way over years before gathering momentum.
- CrazyStat 6y ago
  One of my favorite podcasts [1] is a great example of this. A friend recommended it to me and told me to start at the beginning (already a couple years of back catalog at that point). I almost stopped after the first few episodes, which were interesting but not very well produced. The creator stuck with it though and the quality improved dramatically and pretty quickly. [1] https://www.philosophizethis.org/ https://www.philosophizethis.org/
  - postcynical 6y ago
    And Joe Rogans podcast #1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWBCnvOuXK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWBCnvOuXK8
    - chubot 6y ago
      Funny comment: "This Guy Pulled Off Making 2013 Look Like 1997" I think it's actually from 2009 though, since wikipedia says that was the first episode? It was just uploaded later I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joe_Rogan_Experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joe_Rogan_Experience Still, it's crazy how much video has improved in quality, and exploded in popularity, since just 2009 or 2013 ... damn. I guess this is a little like early bloggers in the early 2000's who were already writers in other mediums. The people who are really successful are the ones involved in the old paradigm (multiple TV shows in Rogan's case), AND who actually embrace the new paradigm.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Webcomics work that way - quite a few webcomics have been written over the course of many years, and you can see the art style slowly changing and the artist's skill improving. You don't notice it if you're subscribing/following the comic, until you jump back to an earlier strip and see how much less skilled the early work was.
redshirtrob 6y ago
I wonder if a good hack would be to think in terms of how I would react if a (my) child showed me something they made? Children are often doing something for the first time. I've noticed this breaks down my barriers to what I consider impressive. Founders are in a similar situation, but since they're almost universally adults, we tend to apply adult prejudices to their work.
russnewcomer 6y ago
I had one thought forming while reading this piece, then read to Carmack's quote in the footnote which encapsulated it. I learned how to program modding games as a teenager, and as an adult now looking back on it, I realize how rough and ready the game engines were in 1996-1998, and how that rough and ready state, combined with my teenager's imbalance between time and money, led to a bunch of what Graham is calling early work where my bad 3d modeling skills, terrible art sense, and ability to sling values around in text files and use tools that other community members made, allowed me to make an entire faction for Total Annihilation that was clearly lower quality than the originals, but really not that much worse. Contrast that to about 2017 when I looked into what it would take to make a very small mod for XCOM, and boy oh boy, so much more work. What advantages I gained from being in that place at that time...
- AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  I had the same experience except modding Motocross Madness and Carmageddon. Carmageddon was especially easy to mod because it was all self-documented data files in .txt format [1] and you could mess with literally everything from graphics to physics. The huge difference between this and now is that if I wanted to mess around with any kind of game I would need an IDE - which for a kid without a technical parent/mentor/friend would be a non-starter. [1] https://carmageddon.fandom.com/wiki/Data_file https://carmageddon.fandom.com/wiki/Data_file
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  Modding is definitely one of those things that has become harder. Often due to lack of availability but definitely in terms of skill level to get near a similar quality bar. But at the same time it's never been easier to make a game from scratch in a whole host of different and easy to use engines.
- musingsole 6y ago
  I've never heavily modded anything, but I made some mods for Skyrim and Fallout 4. In that case, the game engine is anticipating the extensions, so it's a bit easier. Add in community tools and it was stupid easy to do any sort of scripting alterations to a game. I can only imagine the complexity you have to grapple with when wading into a modern game not built to enable it.
jstanley 6y ago
Related: Ira Glass on "The Gap": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI > Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? > A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have. > And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal. > And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
- boris 6y ago
  > But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? "Talent is feeling how should not be."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pram 6y ago
  IMO this has little to do with “taste” and more to do with analytical/critical ability. The more experienced and knowledgeable you become in a creative endeavor, the easier it is to self-critique and (especially in visual art) see mistakes. When you’re starting out drawing for example, you literally can’t see your mistakes. You intuitively know it sucks but you don’t know exactly why. Figuring out that last part puts you on the road to mastery. The rest is accurate though. It does take a lot of grit and working through lots and lots of bad stuff. Developing a creative talent can be a pretty horrible experience because of that ;P
markkat 6y ago
A couple of decades ago, I set forth to create something every day. It could be as simple as a bit of prose, writing some code, or as involved as a birdhouse. I haven't succeeded in creating every day since, but I did successfully create a habit of behavior that I cannot break. I've built games, websites, apps, written blogs, filed patents, built siege engines, been published, painted, carved wooden toys, remodeled houses, and much more. I've also started a couple of companies, one of which went through YCS17 and is still growing. It's sad that there exists any cynicism around creation at all. Our ability to create might be the most human of our qualities. We literally make the world we live in. The creations that excite me most are those that enable people to create even more. I really appreciate what PG is saying here, what he believes, and the dream factory that is YC.
cafard 6y ago
Scholars of literature sometimes speak of "juvenilia", the work a writer does when beginning. This can be quite readable--Jane Austen's are very funny--but not up to the standard of the mature work.
staunch 6y ago
An example of tricking oneself came to mind: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." -- Linus Torvalds on comp.os.minix in 1991
dzink 6y ago
There is creating new work and there is judging early work. One hack I’ve used for both is to realize that your brain is different at different times of day and in different levels of exhaustion/sleep/context etc. You are almost a different person as time passes. That novelty gives you new perspectives and new ideas with time. So always document new ideas (i have even built a new tool to make that as fast as possible) and then live with them for a bit. A good one will haunt you in that it will keep showing itself and resurfacing in other contexts. If the regret of not having it is heavier than the effort to put it together just use a weekend to put it together. For judging ideas, you should pay even more attention to regrets. Your choice is a psychological anchor, so if you chose poorly you may not know it as your brain will automatically try to justify your choices, but if you find yourself angry at past rejections you’ve made on an idea, that’s probably regret talking to you, and that means you’ve been subconsciously haunted by something you should be paying more attention to. Now I’ve learned to note what upsets me about an idea and at times dig in deeper and consider it extra points towards the idea.
ed_balls 6y ago
> One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. Any evidence to back up this claim? Maybe it's true for SV where there are a lot of angel investors. For me, the biggest blocker for starting a "lame" idea is money. Ideally, Fuck-You Money + capital to prove the business model. An example of lame idea: A new footwear company. The main goal would be to optimize for minimal waste. Shoes designed to last 10x the time. The would cost more to purchase, but the cost per month would be the same - so something like a subscription model would need to be in place.
- confidantlake 6y ago
  If the shoe lasted 10x as long, why would you need a subscription? Buy it once, no need to buy it again for 10 years?
  - ed_balls 6y ago
    Because the initial price would be steep. Let's say you spend $70 dollars on shoes and they last 2 years, so that's $350 for 10 years. It would be hard to design a single pair of shoes, especially at the beginning, at lasts 10 years. The goal would be to replace that pair after 5 years. No one would pay $350 for a pair of shoes from an unknown company, but if I'd offer them for $3/month it's a different story.
    - travisjungroth 6y ago
      And if they stop paying they return the shoes? This sounds more like a loan than a subscription.
    - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
      I spend $15 on shoes and they last a year and a half, even though I'm a runner. That's about $100 for 10 years.
- sjg007 6y ago
  I mean you can already buy really nice expensive leather shoes that will last a long time. To last even longer you buy two pairs and alternate them. You can also then get the sole redone if the upper remains in good shape.
sfpoet 6y ago
The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could. An easier way than seeing them as a challenge is to method act the ideas. The source of new ideas is often a new, lived experience. I think of how AirBnB was in the beginning: links from CraigsList to a website where host and guest could message. Payment was in person and in cash! The lived experience of being your own BnB rather than going through all the bureaucratic and government hoops was there, it just needed to be coded.
davebryand 6y ago
So much of the advice I see from YC (PG in this case, I know he isn't YC, but it's all cut from the same cloth) is about how to change your outer circumstances to accommodate inner impediments, such as Fear. They'll offer hacks or "mind games" to trick yourself into moving past the fear, as PG talks about here: "But it's a bit strange that you have to play mind games with yourself to avoid being discouraged by lame-looking early efforts." Unfortunately, I don't see anyone over there talking about conquering fear permanently, such that these issues fall away and what is left is boundless creativity. One tool offered here is to "switch polarity", which means to take the other side of the argument. Fine, but real wisdom comes from transcending polarity. Another tool offered is to tap into the motivation of curiosity. That's great as "early work" on the inner game, but there are much more robust ways to conquer fear when one looks at cutting edge work on consciousness evolution, such as Integral Dynamics, or studies Eastern traditions like Vajrayana or Zen. I look forward to the day where YC elevates this discussion toward awakening themselves and their network to more transcendental tools.
- sjg007 6y ago
  Or you know a good course in cognitive behavioral therapy. I often think YC should have an in house therapist or two.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  You don't want to conquer fear entirely. Fear is an important signal. Physical fear keeps you out of danger; ego fear keeps you from wasting lots of time on fruitless things or doing things not in accord with your values. You want to control fear. Put it in a little box so that it's a signal and not a dictator. Process it so that you're aware of what precisely is making you afraid and can rationally think of ways to mitigate that concern. Fear is a reason to be vigilant and aware, not a reason to freeze up and stop doing what you're doing.
  - ta1234567890 6y ago
    Not the poster who you are replying to, but from the references he gave, I assume he was more or less saying the same as you. In meditation what you want is to become aware of your feelings/emotions/sensations to a level where you can then very consciously choose what to do when something happens, instead of triggering a knee-jerk reaction.
asaph 6y ago
Why doesn't http://paulgraham.com/ http://paulgraham.com/ redirect to https://paulgraham.com/ https://paulgraham.com/? And why doesn't https://paulgraham.com/ https://paulgraham.com/ have a valid SSL cert? I expect better from PG.
- aliakhtar 6y ago
  He made this site in the early 2000s using the store builder he coded in the 90s. His framework probably doesn't even have support for SSL (because it was written in the 90s).
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  It's actually using yahoo store builder. pg has no control over it, because yahoo owns it. He mentioned that to me when I reported that the mobile interface broke various parts of his site.
- sm4rk0 6y ago
  This is really a good question, especially for someone who's presenting themself as a programmer.
rogerdickey 6y ago
I don't disagree with the point on overconfidence but it is a bit exhausting to be surrounded by 10,000+ overconfident CEOs of 3 person companies in Silicon Valley, most of whom will never succeed. It contributes to a culture that can be toxic and alienating for other personality types. Maybe that is the price we pay for innovation.
- jlangemeier 6y ago
  I think that's more the product of VC culture; as a founder you're in a constant case of "selling your company" which in most cases is also selling yourself to people, i.e. investing in a startup is tantamount to investing in the person in the early stages. I haven't seen this mentality nearly as much in folks that are bootstrapping without the "extreme growth" required by VCs. And, although PG is in the Silicon Valley bubble (where only cool things happen, and it's the hub of cool in tech, duh), the advice he has is fairly general. In the board game creator community there's a lot of advice on making things that fail and making things that don't sell "for the fun of making the thing," because let's face it... most of your shit doesn't sell and never has any market value, but that doesn't make it any less useful or instructive. TL;DR: Being okay with "failure" is a major part of any profession or hobby, and isn't intrinsic to Silicon Valley or VC backed startups...
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Dunno, I just think of: > The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. Of course, there's no telling how much extra baggage you've stored in the word "overconfidence" here, but without overconfident risk takers, there aren't many people left to do the job.
  - vikiomega9 6y ago
    Perhaps we don't need as many overconfident risk takers, and I think of this whenever I read about the quiet millionaire or people who have a flourishing business that is not sexy.
- 6y ago
thesausageking 6y ago
One reason why I believe TikTok took off so fast is that they made it ok for videos to not be very good. They're not supposed to be overly polished and perfect. On Instagram, what you post is a reflection of you and how you want the world to see and judge you. TikTok is the opposite: videos are ephemeral, fun little things that you don't have to take seriously.
defen 6y ago
> But the most conspicuous feature of Theranos's cap table is the absence of Silicon Valley firms. Journalists were fooled by Theranos, but Silicon Valley investors weren't. Not really a good defense of Silicon Valley, considering that Tim Draper was Theranos's first investor and a pretty big proponent of them https://twitter.com/RebeccaJarvis/status/974435962930548736 https://twitter.com/RebeccaJarvis/status/974435962930548736
- pchristensen 6y ago
  Tim Draper was friends with Holmes's family and his kids grew up with hers. He invested personally, but I don't think his firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson did. Theranos' fundraising was primarily from outside of SV: "Documents unsealed in a lawsuit brought against Theranos reveal a number of the high profile investors who had a stake in the nearly worthless start-up: The Waltons, founders of Walmart, with $150 million; Rupert Murdoch, with $125 million; and the DeVos family, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, with $100 million. The investments were made between 2013 and 2015, according to the Journal." - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/theranos-devos-other-investors-reportedly-lost-over-600-million.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/theranos-devos-other-investo...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hugs 6y ago
    You can go directly to the SEC's website for the information. In Theranos' earliest SEC filing, "Draper Fisher Jurvetson Fund VII, L.P." is listed as a Beneficial Owner. Filing Date 2005-01-03 File/File Number 021-72626 05000011
- ameliaquining 6y ago
  DFJ put in $500,000. At their scale, that's chump change. They can safely invest that much money even in companies that are unlikely to succeed. And IIUC, Theranos wasn't a fraud at that point—there was still genuine hope that their product would work. pg, and others pushing back against the Theranos-as-an-indictment-of-Silicon-Valley-venture-capital narrative, are talking about the firms that invested much larger sums after Elizabeth Holmes had gotten a lot of good press and become a hot commodity (and, in most cases, after she'd started engaging in fraud, unbeknownst to most). Those firms lost their shirts in a way that DFJ didn't.
UncleOxidant 6y ago
Seems a little too "rah, rah, Silicon Valley!". Silicon valley is becoming less a geographical location and more of a state of mind.
underdeserver 6y ago
> t also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident. I've noticed in many fields that the most successful people are slightly overconfident. On the face of it this seems implausible. Surely it would be optimal to have exactly the right estimate of one's abilities. How could it be an advantage to be mistaken? Because this error compensates for other sources of error in the opposite direction: being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own. I disagree. Being overconfident compensates for the amount of luck you need to succeed. If 100 people are overconfident, and 5 of them succeed, it paid off for these 5 to be overconfident - because when you have that kind of luck, overconfidence is the appropriate level of confidence. For an excellent demonstration of the importance of luck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I&vl=en https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I&vl=en
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  100 of 100 people are never overconfident (by definition). Overconfidence is infectious (because not everyone can vet every claim). Overconfident people are inherently predisposed to selection bias by others.
maverickJ 6y ago
This ties in with the theme of this newsletter https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/take-the-role-and-prove-yourself https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/take-the-role-and-pr... about Nikola Tesla and starting your first job in an industry you're new too. "Many a-times, brilliant young people join an organisation and want to start right at the top or at a glamorous role. They get aggrieved when they are not given the shiny, glamorous role that commands respect or gives social proof. This tends to result in them doing a poor job of whatever role they have been given. I posit that we can learn from the Tesla story described above. Take the job and prove yourself once an opportunity presents itself. It might not be what you envisioned last year before the pandemic and lockdown. It’s important to get into the door and then set the standards to where you believe you belong."
- nickff 6y ago
  I think Tesla was right, but the attitude issue reflects on the individual's mindset (in addition to the focus issue he aptly described). Some people will do any job to the best of their ability, whether it's sweeping the floors or managing a company; others will continually lust after the more prestigious position, and never accomplish the tasks at hand.
  - maverickJ 6y ago
    Interesting points raised.
  - qznc 6y ago
    It is an interesting question if being good at your current job helps you to advance to the next level. Should it? I guess the answer depends on your point of view if the world and humans.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  I'm your target audience, seeing as this year was my first year in the workforce and I'm young. I don't see the point in trying to prove yourself in most situations, since most organizations have little opportunity. I just quit my first tech job. The first team I was on had very little agency and was basically told what to do, the second team I was on had an "architect" who dictated how everything was going to be. Without going into boring details, I was told by management and other team members I was doing well and it showed compared to most of the other Juniors I worked with. I don't want a glamorous role, or one that gives me social proof. I just want to have some agency and the opportunity to take on responsibility and advance. It seems like that's hard to come by, though.
arthurjj 6y ago
The two paragraphs in the middle about how it gets harder as you get older is exactly the problem I'm having right now. Your standards rise, which is generally good, and you have fewer long blocks of time. Both of these problems are from success both professionally and personally e.g. good career and happy family. The only trick I've found that helps with this 'problem' is only do one new thing at a time.
GCA10 6y ago
I like Graham's points about overconfidence, peer groups and (judicious amounts of) ignorance, all of which he champions quite strongly. But drilling deeper on "rate of change" is an undervalued element that deserves a closer look. The best innovators are really good at taking Version 1.0 and figuring out what rework will turn it into a better 2.0, and then 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, etc. This is an identifiable skill! It can be cultivated. Once you've got it, the failings of Version 1.0 do not ruin your self-esteem. You just get to work on fixing them. And not enough people think about this systematically. One of my favorite museum stops of all time was the British Library, where a glass case held Paul McCartney's first draft of "Yesterday." You could see, cross-out by cross-out, how a somewhat awkward ballad got turned into a pop classic. I'll submit that almost everything that looks like genius from a distance is a lot of step-by-step craft when viewed more closely. I did some consulting at Facebook in 2008 and it was quite amazing seeing how rapidly and incessantly Team Zuckerberg was not just adding features, but also rejiggering the way the feed worked; the layout, the everything. Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into.
- CerealFounder 6y ago
  "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." - Marky Mark Twain
  - datameta 6y ago
    "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- hyperpallium2 6y ago
  call the first version 0.1 Also, Michelangelo did drafts and studies. So why can't I?
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  > Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into. Yeah...but the other side of that depends on what the definition of “dodgy” is. For example, say we have a server-based app. If the DB schema is badly-designed (usually overcomplicated), then we are truly pooched, as we’ll start to figure that out after we have a few thousand users. If the DB design is OK, even if it is primitive and simple, then we can have naive, problematic code, yet plenty of room to grow. I’ve learned to design for the unknown. It’s really paid off, for me, but YMMV.
aliakhtar 6y ago
Here's my ugly duckling: naminus.com
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Clickable: https://naminus.com/ https://naminus.com/ I tried entering "tpu" which broke it. :) But then I tried "test" which worked. Nice site!
jzer0cool 6y ago
> One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. I see this more concisely written as: One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work __is the fear is fear itself__ Anyone have some examples? I have some. * For example, not taking a job upon offer, for fear of failing. * I witness some mananger's/companies inducing fear, rather than embrace failure as one of the options. Without enabling high risk, high reward, people settle for safer low risk and mediocre results. I think some of the best works also results from beginners. They add the new perspective needed & creative flair as new source of input.
- watt 6y ago
  Are you this good going from abstract to practical? I know I am not. For me the it's a revelation that _fear itself_ actually is _fear of making something lame_. So, I don't really see the value of expressing this "concisely" because if will never arrive from A to B, if A is abstract pattern. Though once you have shown me that A is equivalent to B (the practical), I do agree, A is equivalent to B. But, unless you show me B upfront, just concisely stating A to me is of no value: I can not make the connection from Abstract to Practical. Only from practical (something lame) to maybe abstract (fear itself). This is also why I don't really buy in to the whole "conciseness" thing - I prefer things spelled out. I suspect many others do too.
  - jzer0cool 6y ago
    There are many kinds of fear. Sure, lameness could be one. But I think it is rooted in fear of something else. Fear of failure. Fear of judgement. Fear of mistakes. ... I would argue lameness (as those listed here above) are still abstract. Are you saying you cannot move towards defining and understanding what is causing the fear when you create something lame?
alexashka 6y ago
> One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. No, the biggest thing holding people back from doing great work is resources. Everything else is a distant concern. Remember what Y Combinator does? It connects people with resources, to people who claim they'll do great work. Good, boring, mundane redistribution of resources from old rich people to young capable people. Good, do more of that and please spare us your 'wisdom' - it leads to bullshit artists whose sole skill is 'appreciating' your 'wisdom' to insert themselves into the process and ruin the whole thing.
- mikewarot 6y ago
  I think he had it right... the thing holding most people back is fear, most of the time. It's only after you get past the fear, does the need for more resources come into play.
- dang 6y ago
  YC adds resources to people who are already making something. It may not be what they'll end up with (Segment, recently acquired, started with an entirely different idea) but they've started. In the passage you quoted, PG is talking about an earlier stage than that. ("They're too frightened even to start.")
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- lowkeynthorough 6y ago
  I think you almost hit the nail on the head.. it’s like a paraphrase of that saying about genius vs talent.. the difference between good work and great work is.. good work takes resources, but properly great work surprises us with how little it takes..
nilpunning 6y ago
"It also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident." You do not need to cultivate this personality trait in our culture. Far more people go too far with this than not far enough, myself included. Overconfident people believe they know more than they actually do, so they are more eager to criticize your novel idea. This is the type of thinking Graham says he wants to avoid in earlier paragraphs. Instead of cultivating overconfidence through the deadly sin of pride, we should cultivate increasing true confidence through the cardinal virtue of courage. You can build your confidence by taking greater and greater courageous action. Courage is the choice to confront pain, ridicule, and the unknown all for an uncertain reward. Graham says, "being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own." Acting courageously does this much, much better. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if Graham agreed. The rest of the essay does a pretty good job explaining how to go about acting courageously, just without using the word.
- linguistbreaker 6y ago
  This reminds me of the saying that the three virtues of a great programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Yes, Get Things Done, iterate. Overconfidence hurts when reality catches. Low expectations helps to recover.
geocrasher 6y ago
If you aren't embarrassed by your previous work, then you're not growing. Don't let little things like failure or poor quality stop you from trying. This is normal. Embrace it, learn, and keep doing things.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I think embarrassment really comes from writing code that you thought was great and then you look back at it and read it and it's too confident for it's own good. Learning is a gradual process–I'm almost never embarrassed by the code I wrote in the past, but that's not because that code is perfect; it's just that I made the best choices I could at the time, and made sure to know enough to identify what I didn't know back then. Embarrassment stems out of not knowing what you don't know and acting on that.
zuhayeer 6y ago
"To start a painting saying that it's just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it's just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it to something more" Another reason to have lower standards initially is so you can properly measure the intensity of a problem. The harder your product is to use, the better the gauge for how much people truly want it. Either a) people use your product despite its shoddiness or b) people complain about what more they want And if people don't do either, well then it was just a "quick hack" to keep iterating from.
tppiotrowski 6y ago
The reason many hope you'll succeed is that they hope to rise with you. With investors this incentive is particularly explicit. They want you to succeed because they hope you'll make them rich in the process. I'm more cynical. Investors benefit from the illusion of success, whether it is real or not. They can invest in something they don't think will succeed if PR and marketing can increase the valuation.
- ksdale 6y ago
  This is true, but they would all prefer the real version to the illusion, and as an entrepreneur, you know if it's all smoke and mirrors or not, so it doesn't really matter if the investor believes in you or not, as long as they earnestly support you.
jodrellblank 6y ago
> "The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could." OK nothing happens without optimism and work and cynically excluding everything will leave you with nowhere to go, but the solution to that can't be optimistically including everything. If you want to lose lots of money, look at the penny stock market and think of all the ways those companies could become massive instead of looking for reasons they won't. Think of all the reasons alterntive cancer treatments could work, all the reasons UFOs could exist, all the reasons giving money to the local mega-church could be a good idea. It's way to easy for most of us to convince ourselves of the happy path of a bunch of nonsense, and it's cynicism which keeps us away from the worst excesses of woo and hype and being conned or abused. It's easy to think of reasons online grocery delivery "could work" during COVID19 in 2020, but if you were doing that in 1999 and investing in Webvan you'd have lost everything. Webvan "could work" and you could have thought of many reasons why, and you would have lost all your money. The people thinking why it couldn't work saved their bacon. Boo.com online fashion in 1999, the people thinking why it couldn't work saved their money and time and effort, even though online clothes shopping totally could work and does today. Or that thinking of reasons why you could learn painting is irrelevant if you don't want to spend your time painting. You may as well rule it out first instead of challenging yourself all the ways you could become good at it and fit it into your life.
ratonroy 6y ago
GCA10 1 day ago [–] I like Graham's points about overconfidence, peer groups and (judicious amounts of) ignorance, all of which he champions quite strongly. But drilling deeper on "rate of change" is an undervalued element that deserves a closer look. The best innovators are really good at taking Version 1.0 and figuring out what rework will turn it into a better 2.0, and then 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, etc. This is an identifiable skill! It can be cultivated. Once you've got it, the failings of Version 1.0 do not ruin your self-esteem. You just get to work on fixing them. And not enough people think about this systematically. One of my favorite museum stops of all time was the British Library, where a glass case held Paul McCartney's first draft of "Yesterday." You could see, cross-out by cross-out, how a somewhat awkward ballad got turned into a pop classic.
lowkeynthorough 6y ago
I think there is a kind of blind spot, if not contradiction, in the essay. It could be a good kind of paradox like the immovable object vs irresistible force thing.. it’s the paradox of lisp, of bel, of Julia, of mit style hacking.. they MIGHT aspire to be good jokes but as far as I can see they are at best, some kind of inside joke.. it’s a special kind of lame.. maybe we shouldn’t ask whether jokes can be ambitious but whether ambitions can be truly hysterically funny

577 points by harscoat 6y ago

I think removing frictions from starting new things & automating the mundane things like project setup, doc setup etc. goes along way to cross the bridge from 'wanting to build something' to 'building it'. As well as ability to track things being worked on sorted by priority. I currently do that part in Notion. (https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/ideas https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/ideas) Working in public on anything is very useful too as there is a long time inbetween making something and 'truly releasing' something. I remember the talk on how https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent started off as a simple readme. Got lots of interest & comments and only then was the idea validated and got built on, already with community. Here is the great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqnvKP1DYRI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqnvKP1DYRI

jacobush 6y ago
It can also be a great distraction to fiddle around with the supporting tools instead of the thing itself.
- TacoSteemers 6y ago
  Fiddling around can also be okay, if it is relaxing.
- nikivi 6y ago
  True but the project templates is a solved problem. I haven't chosen one I liked yet but here are some options: https://www.notion.so/nikitavoloboev/Project-generator-3cd7414001cb4c4d8c2df38dfe41ed41 https://www.notion.so/nikitavoloboev/Project-generator-3cd74...
- rraghur 6y ago
  This is unfortunately, me.. I've slowly come to the conclusion of not using to avoid it completely (that's to hard), but rather timebox it when i catch myself drifting

curiousllama 6y ago

> Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem clever. It's ~100x harder to create than critique. I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?" People will freely tell you the latter, but rarely the former.

tcgv 6y ago
That's my standard approach to work, I always try to invalidate an idea before investing my time (or the team's time) in it. If we can't invalidate the idea I feel much more confident that we're going in the right direction. On the other hand a lot of people spend too much energy trying to support the idea, which often is a reflection of confirmation bias / wishful thinking in their thought process.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Invalidating an idea is a bad idea because old ideas are bad until they’re suddenly very good. For example, before Napoleon, cannons were often a terrible idea: unreliable and rarely decisive. Then the technology caught up to the idea.
  - username90 6y ago
    Which is why it is good to know why things are bad so you know when they no longer applies. If you just try to be positive then you'd try to use cannons when they were still not good enough to be practical on the field.
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      In theory yes, but it often takes a believer to push through the naysayers. Facebook seemed a terrible idea when it first came out. Ditto for Airbnb.
      - 6y ago

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bob33212 6y ago

Humans naturally think linearly. This is because our lizard brains have evolved over millions of years in environment where linear processes were the most important to understand for survival. When we see a lion that is 1 mile away we know that we have 2x the time to run away than when the lion is .5 miles away. So when we see a crappy project that took a few months to create, we naturally assume that it will be slightly less crappy in a few more months. We can't even imagine what it would look like if it was 100x more useful in 9 months. Even PG and other great early investors only have a slight notion of what that would look like.

carterklein13 6y ago
I have to disagree - I feel like most successful investors explicitly look for ideas that can grow in the exponential fashion you describe. YC particularly doesn't seem to show any interest towards linearly-scalable businesses AFAIK. EDIT: Or, rather, I agree with the point you're making, but I think it's pretty commonly-held belief.

Mizza 6y ago

Obligatory Ira Glass quote: “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

blakesmith 6y ago
This article reminded me of the same quote! Here's the original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE
cyberdrunk 6y ago
It's missing the bit where he explains that doing good work is in many fields (in precisely the ones that people are attracted to) is not enough to sustain yourself. You need to be super good or be lucky, have connections or some other form advantage.
HorizonXP 6y ago
I got put onto this quote/video by @garry here on HN, when he included it in his most recent YouTube video where he discusses how he made his channel grow & be successful. It's definitely something I've struggled with for a long time, and I wish I had found it sooner.

sillysaurusx 6y ago

Why do certain days seem better suited to doing good work? Most days, I feel like doing nothing. But some days, the computer calls to me, and it would be foolish to ignore it. If I’ve done anything impressive, it’s during those days. But why? And can those days be maximized? Is it strictly a product of one’s environment? It can’t be; the institute for advanced study showed that you can have a perfect environment but make no progress.

xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
What's the perfect environment?
- martin_a 6y ago
  That differs from person to person and you'll have to find out for yourself. I enjoy the late afternoon hours when most of my colleagues are already gone, the phone rings not as often and I can put some music on headphones. Takes me about 15 minutes till I get into the flow state and am highly productive.
  - tartoran 6y ago
    Likewise and I have to add that mornings I am usually not very productive anyway, regardless of the environment. I've been working from home for the past few Covid months and the bulk of my work is done in the afternoon. That's not very convenient for me as I'd like to enjoy my time off after 5, but I usually end up past that to take advantage of the momentum built.
ackbar03 6y ago
Seems like a strange comment for the article but since you made it, For me its not that I don't feel like doing work on most days. Instead I have periods where I am super uber productive and days where I feel completely exhausted. I can't tell if its a mental thing or rather there's actually something physically wrong Lol. My mind tends to be blurry like its rebelling and if I force myself to work hard I start feeling feverish. I have trouble figuring out if I'm not working hard enough or working too hard. I wonder if its also like that for some of the successful startup founders out there too

Hongwei 6y ago

I've always told people interested in startup to "start a project, not a company." I haven't been able to verbalize why yet until this: But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.

povik 6y ago
How can you know that such an impulse is part of some country’s national culture? I sometimes think about what sets successful and less successful countries apart, and how profound an effect can cultures have. Assuming that smart people are born everywhere at similar rate, and disregarding unfree societies with authoritative regimes or paralysing religious dogmas, I would naively expect similar outcomes among countries. I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture, but I guess I will never know.
- Kluny 6y ago
  In Denmark it's so prevalent that it's codified as Jante's Law. It's not a prescriptive law, despite the way it's phrased. It's more descriptive, a satirical summary of the way Danes think of ambitious people. - You're not to think you are anything special. - You're not to think you are as good as we are. - You're not to think you are smarter than we are. - You're not to imagine yourself better than we are. - You're not to think you know more than we do. - You're not to think you are more important than we are. - You're not to think you are good at anything. - You're not to laugh at us. - You're not to think anyone cares about you. - You're not to think you can teach us anything.
  - abhayhegde 6y ago
    I may be misinterpreting it here. Although a few points (see point no. 6, 8, 9) help one stay grounded and humble, the other points can be seen as degrading the self-worth of an ambitious person.

Sodman 6y ago

Has paulgraham.com never had TLS or is it just more obvious now because of Chrome UI changes? I find the old-school style & minimalism helps focus on the content, but shouldn't he at least have a LetsEncrypt cert up there or something? Or is the argument that because the site has no interactivity, it's not a big deal?

snazz 6y ago
It has a TLS certificate for the Yahoo Store domain if you browse to the https:// https:// version, but I agree that PG should add something easy like Let's Encrypt or put it behind Cloudflare. It's been "modernized" with a mobile version already, so I think that HTTPS is a good next step. It can't hurt, at least.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
What would you, as a user, gain from the site being https? Do you ever share confidential data with the site?

jasim 6y ago

There are two places where it is possible to see early, "lame" work. One is YouTube - most channels with well-made videos would retain their earliest works, and the first few dozen can be quite instructive. Second is GitHub - the first few hundred commits of many successful open-source projects. It is a wonder to see sprawling codebases starting at its first commit, and plodding its way over years before gathering momentum.

CrazyStat 6y ago
One of my favorite podcasts [1] is a great example of this. A friend recommended it to me and told me to start at the beginning (already a couple years of back catalog at that point). I almost stopped after the first few episodes, which were interesting but not very well produced. The creator stuck with it though and the quality improved dramatically and pretty quickly. [1] https://www.philosophizethis.org/ https://www.philosophizethis.org/
- postcynical 6y ago
  And Joe Rogans podcast #1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWBCnvOuXK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWBCnvOuXK8
  - chubot 6y ago
    Funny comment: "This Guy Pulled Off Making 2013 Look Like 1997" I think it's actually from 2009 though, since wikipedia says that was the first episode? It was just uploaded later I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joe_Rogan_Experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joe_Rogan_Experience Still, it's crazy how much video has improved in quality, and exploded in popularity, since just 2009 or 2013 ... damn. I guess this is a little like early bloggers in the early 2000's who were already writers in other mediums. The people who are really successful are the ones involved in the old paradigm (multiple TV shows in Rogan's case), AND who actually embrace the new paradigm.
PeterisP 6y ago
Webcomics work that way - quite a few webcomics have been written over the course of many years, and you can see the art style slowly changing and the artist's skill improving. You don't notice it if you're subscribing/following the comic, until you jump back to an earlier strip and see how much less skilled the early work was.

redshirtrob 6y ago

I wonder if a good hack would be to think in terms of how I would react if a (my) child showed me something they made? Children are often doing something for the first time. I've noticed this breaks down my barriers to what I consider impressive. Founders are in a similar situation, but since they're almost universally adults, we tend to apply adult prejudices to their work.

russnewcomer 6y ago

I had one thought forming while reading this piece, then read to Carmack's quote in the footnote which encapsulated it. I learned how to program modding games as a teenager, and as an adult now looking back on it, I realize how rough and ready the game engines were in 1996-1998, and how that rough and ready state, combined with my teenager's imbalance between time and money, led to a bunch of what Graham is calling early work where my bad 3d modeling skills, terrible art sense, and ability to sling values around in text files and use tools that other community members made, allowed me to make an entire faction for Total Annihilation that was clearly lower quality than the originals, but really not that much worse. Contrast that to about 2017 when I looked into what it would take to make a very small mod for XCOM, and boy oh boy, so much more work. What advantages I gained from being in that place at that time...

AndrewKemendo 6y ago
I had the same experience except modding Motocross Madness and Carmageddon. Carmageddon was especially easy to mod because it was all self-documented data files in .txt format [1] and you could mess with literally everything from graphics to physics. The huge difference between this and now is that if I wanted to mess around with any kind of game I would need an IDE - which for a kid without a technical parent/mentor/friend would be a non-starter. [1] https://carmageddon.fandom.com/wiki/Data_file https://carmageddon.fandom.com/wiki/Data_file
meheleventyone 6y ago
Modding is definitely one of those things that has become harder. Often due to lack of availability but definitely in terms of skill level to get near a similar quality bar. But at the same time it's never been easier to make a game from scratch in a whole host of different and easy to use engines.
musingsole 6y ago
I've never heavily modded anything, but I made some mods for Skyrim and Fallout 4. In that case, the game engine is anticipating the extensions, so it's a bit easier. Add in community tools and it was stupid easy to do any sort of scripting alterations to a game. I can only imagine the complexity you have to grapple with when wading into a modern game not built to enable it.

jstanley 6y ago

Related: Ira Glass on "The Gap": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI > Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? > A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have. > And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal. > And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

boris 6y ago
> But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? "Talent is feeling how should not be."
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pram 6y ago
IMO this has little to do with “taste” and more to do with analytical/critical ability. The more experienced and knowledgeable you become in a creative endeavor, the easier it is to self-critique and (especially in visual art) see mistakes. When you’re starting out drawing for example, you literally can’t see your mistakes. You intuitively know it sucks but you don’t know exactly why. Figuring out that last part puts you on the road to mastery. The rest is accurate though. It does take a lot of grit and working through lots and lots of bad stuff. Developing a creative talent can be a pretty horrible experience because of that ;P

markkat 6y ago

A couple of decades ago, I set forth to create something every day. It could be as simple as a bit of prose, writing some code, or as involved as a birdhouse. I haven't succeeded in creating every day since, but I did successfully create a habit of behavior that I cannot break. I've built games, websites, apps, written blogs, filed patents, built siege engines, been published, painted, carved wooden toys, remodeled houses, and much more. I've also started a couple of companies, one of which went through YCS17 and is still growing. It's sad that there exists any cynicism around creation at all. Our ability to create might be the most human of our qualities. We literally make the world we live in. The creations that excite me most are those that enable people to create even more. I really appreciate what PG is saying here, what he believes, and the dream factory that is YC.

cafard 6y ago

Scholars of literature sometimes speak of "juvenilia", the work a writer does when beginning. This can be quite readable--Jane Austen's are very funny--but not up to the standard of the mature work.

staunch 6y ago

An example of tricking oneself came to mind: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." -- Linus Torvalds on comp.os.minix in 1991

dzink 6y ago

There is creating new work and there is judging early work. One hack I’ve used for both is to realize that your brain is different at different times of day and in different levels of exhaustion/sleep/context etc. You are almost a different person as time passes. That novelty gives you new perspectives and new ideas with time. So always document new ideas (i have even built a new tool to make that as fast as possible) and then live with them for a bit. A good one will haunt you in that it will keep showing itself and resurfacing in other contexts. If the regret of not having it is heavier than the effort to put it together just use a weekend to put it together. For judging ideas, you should pay even more attention to regrets. Your choice is a psychological anchor, so if you chose poorly you may not know it as your brain will automatically try to justify your choices, but if you find yourself angry at past rejections you’ve made on an idea, that’s probably regret talking to you, and that means you’ve been subconsciously haunted by something you should be paying more attention to. Now I’ve learned to note what upsets me about an idea and at times dig in deeper and consider it extra points towards the idea.

ed_balls 6y ago

> One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. Any evidence to back up this claim? Maybe it's true for SV where there are a lot of angel investors. For me, the biggest blocker for starting a "lame" idea is money. Ideally, Fuck-You Money + capital to prove the business model. An example of lame idea: A new footwear company. The main goal would be to optimize for minimal waste. Shoes designed to last 10x the time. The would cost more to purchase, but the cost per month would be the same - so something like a subscription model would need to be in place.

confidantlake 6y ago
If the shoe lasted 10x as long, why would you need a subscription? Buy it once, no need to buy it again for 10 years?
- ed_balls 6y ago
  Because the initial price would be steep. Let's say you spend $70 dollars on shoes and they last 2 years, so that's $350 for 10 years. It would be hard to design a single pair of shoes, especially at the beginning, at lasts 10 years. The goal would be to replace that pair after 5 years. No one would pay $350 for a pair of shoes from an unknown company, but if I'd offer them for $3/month it's a different story.
  - travisjungroth 6y ago
    And if they stop paying they return the shoes? This sounds more like a loan than a subscription.
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
    I spend $15 on shoes and they last a year and a half, even though I'm a runner. That's about $100 for 10 years.
sjg007 6y ago
I mean you can already buy really nice expensive leather shoes that will last a long time. To last even longer you buy two pairs and alternate them. You can also then get the sole redone if the upper remains in good shape.

sfpoet 6y ago

The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could. An easier way than seeing them as a challenge is to method act the ideas. The source of new ideas is often a new, lived experience. I think of how AirBnB was in the beginning: links from CraigsList to a website where host and guest could message. Payment was in person and in cash! The lived experience of being your own BnB rather than going through all the bureaucratic and government hoops was there, it just needed to be coded.

davebryand 6y ago

So much of the advice I see from YC (PG in this case, I know he isn't YC, but it's all cut from the same cloth) is about how to change your outer circumstances to accommodate inner impediments, such as Fear. They'll offer hacks or "mind games" to trick yourself into moving past the fear, as PG talks about here: "But it's a bit strange that you have to play mind games with yourself to avoid being discouraged by lame-looking early efforts." Unfortunately, I don't see anyone over there talking about conquering fear permanently, such that these issues fall away and what is left is boundless creativity. One tool offered here is to "switch polarity", which means to take the other side of the argument. Fine, but real wisdom comes from transcending polarity. Another tool offered is to tap into the motivation of curiosity. That's great as "early work" on the inner game, but there are much more robust ways to conquer fear when one looks at cutting edge work on consciousness evolution, such as Integral Dynamics, or studies Eastern traditions like Vajrayana or Zen. I look forward to the day where YC elevates this discussion toward awakening themselves and their network to more transcendental tools.

sjg007 6y ago
Or you know a good course in cognitive behavioral therapy. I often think YC should have an in house therapist or two.
nostrademons 6y ago
You don't want to conquer fear entirely. Fear is an important signal. Physical fear keeps you out of danger; ego fear keeps you from wasting lots of time on fruitless things or doing things not in accord with your values. You want to control fear. Put it in a little box so that it's a signal and not a dictator. Process it so that you're aware of what precisely is making you afraid and can rationally think of ways to mitigate that concern. Fear is a reason to be vigilant and aware, not a reason to freeze up and stop doing what you're doing.
- ta1234567890 6y ago
  Not the poster who you are replying to, but from the references he gave, I assume he was more or less saying the same as you. In meditation what you want is to become aware of your feelings/emotions/sensations to a level where you can then very consciously choose what to do when something happens, instead of triggering a knee-jerk reaction.

asaph 6y ago

Why doesn't http://paulgraham.com/ http://paulgraham.com/ redirect to https://paulgraham.com/ https://paulgraham.com/? And why doesn't https://paulgraham.com/ https://paulgraham.com/ have a valid SSL cert? I expect better from PG.

aliakhtar 6y ago
He made this site in the early 2000s using the store builder he coded in the 90s. His framework probably doesn't even have support for SSL (because it was written in the 90s).
sillysaurusx 6y ago
It's actually using yahoo store builder. pg has no control over it, because yahoo owns it. He mentioned that to me when I reported that the mobile interface broke various parts of his site.
sm4rk0 6y ago
This is really a good question, especially for someone who's presenting themself as a programmer.

rogerdickey 6y ago

I don't disagree with the point on overconfidence but it is a bit exhausting to be surrounded by 10,000+ overconfident CEOs of 3 person companies in Silicon Valley, most of whom will never succeed. It contributes to a culture that can be toxic and alienating for other personality types. Maybe that is the price we pay for innovation.

jlangemeier 6y ago
I think that's more the product of VC culture; as a founder you're in a constant case of "selling your company" which in most cases is also selling yourself to people, i.e. investing in a startup is tantamount to investing in the person in the early stages. I haven't seen this mentality nearly as much in folks that are bootstrapping without the "extreme growth" required by VCs. And, although PG is in the Silicon Valley bubble (where only cool things happen, and it's the hub of cool in tech, duh), the advice he has is fairly general. In the board game creator community there's a lot of advice on making things that fail and making things that don't sell "for the fun of making the thing," because let's face it... most of your shit doesn't sell and never has any market value, but that doesn't make it any less useful or instructive. TL;DR: Being okay with "failure" is a major part of any profession or hobby, and isn't intrinsic to Silicon Valley or VC backed startups...
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Dunno, I just think of: > The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. Of course, there's no telling how much extra baggage you've stored in the word "overconfidence" here, but without overconfident risk takers, there aren't many people left to do the job.
- vikiomega9 6y ago
  Perhaps we don't need as many overconfident risk takers, and I think of this whenever I read about the quiet millionaire or people who have a flourishing business that is not sexy.
6y ago

thesausageking 6y ago

One reason why I believe TikTok took off so fast is that they made it ok for videos to not be very good. They're not supposed to be overly polished and perfect. On Instagram, what you post is a reflection of you and how you want the world to see and judge you. TikTok is the opposite: videos are ephemeral, fun little things that you don't have to take seriously.

defen 6y ago

> But the most conspicuous feature of Theranos's cap table is the absence of Silicon Valley firms. Journalists were fooled by Theranos, but Silicon Valley investors weren't. Not really a good defense of Silicon Valley, considering that Tim Draper was Theranos's first investor and a pretty big proponent of them https://twitter.com/RebeccaJarvis/status/974435962930548736 https://twitter.com/RebeccaJarvis/status/974435962930548736

pchristensen 6y ago
Tim Draper was friends with Holmes's family and his kids grew up with hers. He invested personally, but I don't think his firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson did. Theranos' fundraising was primarily from outside of SV: "Documents unsealed in a lawsuit brought against Theranos reveal a number of the high profile investors who had a stake in the nearly worthless start-up: The Waltons, founders of Walmart, with $150 million; Rupert Murdoch, with $125 million; and the DeVos family, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, with $100 million. The investments were made between 2013 and 2015, according to the Journal." - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/theranos-devos-other-investors-reportedly-lost-over-600-million.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/theranos-devos-other-investo...
- deleted 6y ago
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- hugs 6y ago
  You can go directly to the SEC's website for the information. In Theranos' earliest SEC filing, "Draper Fisher Jurvetson Fund VII, L.P." is listed as a Beneficial Owner. Filing Date 2005-01-03 File/File Number 021-72626 05000011
ameliaquining 6y ago
DFJ put in $500,000. At their scale, that's chump change. They can safely invest that much money even in companies that are unlikely to succeed. And IIUC, Theranos wasn't a fraud at that point—there was still genuine hope that their product would work. pg, and others pushing back against the Theranos-as-an-indictment-of-Silicon-Valley-venture-capital narrative, are talking about the firms that invested much larger sums after Elizabeth Holmes had gotten a lot of good press and become a hot commodity (and, in most cases, after she'd started engaging in fraud, unbeknownst to most). Those firms lost their shirts in a way that DFJ didn't.

UncleOxidant 6y ago

Seems a little too "rah, rah, Silicon Valley!". Silicon valley is becoming less a geographical location and more of a state of mind.

underdeserver 6y ago

> t also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident. I've noticed in many fields that the most successful people are slightly overconfident. On the face of it this seems implausible. Surely it would be optimal to have exactly the right estimate of one's abilities. How could it be an advantage to be mistaken? Because this error compensates for other sources of error in the opposite direction: being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own. I disagree. Being overconfident compensates for the amount of luck you need to succeed. If 100 people are overconfident, and 5 of them succeed, it paid off for these 5 to be overconfident - because when you have that kind of luck, overconfidence is the appropriate level of confidence. For an excellent demonstration of the importance of luck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I&vl=en https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I&vl=en

eyelidlessness 6y ago
100 of 100 people are never overconfident (by definition). Overconfidence is infectious (because not everyone can vet every claim). Overconfident people are inherently predisposed to selection bias by others.

maverickJ 6y ago

This ties in with the theme of this newsletter https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/take-the-role-and-prove-yourself https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/take-the-role-and-pr... about Nikola Tesla and starting your first job in an industry you're new too. "Many a-times, brilliant young people join an organisation and want to start right at the top or at a glamorous role. They get aggrieved when they are not given the shiny, glamorous role that commands respect or gives social proof. This tends to result in them doing a poor job of whatever role they have been given. I posit that we can learn from the Tesla story described above. Take the job and prove yourself once an opportunity presents itself. It might not be what you envisioned last year before the pandemic and lockdown. It’s important to get into the door and then set the standards to where you believe you belong."

nickff 6y ago
I think Tesla was right, but the attitude issue reflects on the individual's mindset (in addition to the focus issue he aptly described). Some people will do any job to the best of their ability, whether it's sweeping the floors or managing a company; others will continually lust after the more prestigious position, and never accomplish the tasks at hand.
- maverickJ 6y ago
  Interesting points raised.
- qznc 6y ago
  It is an interesting question if being good at your current job helps you to advance to the next level. Should it? I guess the answer depends on your point of view if the world and humans.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
I'm your target audience, seeing as this year was my first year in the workforce and I'm young. I don't see the point in trying to prove yourself in most situations, since most organizations have little opportunity. I just quit my first tech job. The first team I was on had very little agency and was basically told what to do, the second team I was on had an "architect" who dictated how everything was going to be. Without going into boring details, I was told by management and other team members I was doing well and it showed compared to most of the other Juniors I worked with. I don't want a glamorous role, or one that gives me social proof. I just want to have some agency and the opportunity to take on responsibility and advance. It seems like that's hard to come by, though.

arthurjj 6y ago

The two paragraphs in the middle about how it gets harder as you get older is exactly the problem I'm having right now. Your standards rise, which is generally good, and you have fewer long blocks of time. Both of these problems are from success both professionally and personally e.g. good career and happy family. The only trick I've found that helps with this 'problem' is only do one new thing at a time.

GCA10 6y ago

I like Graham's points about overconfidence, peer groups and (judicious amounts of) ignorance, all of which he champions quite strongly. But drilling deeper on "rate of change" is an undervalued element that deserves a closer look. The best innovators are really good at taking Version 1.0 and figuring out what rework will turn it into a better 2.0, and then 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, etc. This is an identifiable skill! It can be cultivated. Once you've got it, the failings of Version 1.0 do not ruin your self-esteem. You just get to work on fixing them. And not enough people think about this systematically. One of my favorite museum stops of all time was the British Library, where a glass case held Paul McCartney's first draft of "Yesterday." You could see, cross-out by cross-out, how a somewhat awkward ballad got turned into a pop classic. I'll submit that almost everything that looks like genius from a distance is a lot of step-by-step craft when viewed more closely. I did some consulting at Facebook in 2008 and it was quite amazing seeing how rapidly and incessantly Team Zuckerberg was not just adding features, but also rejiggering the way the feed worked; the layout, the everything. Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into.

CerealFounder 6y ago
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." - Marky Mark Twain
- datameta 6y ago
  "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
hyperpallium2 6y ago
call the first version 0.1 Also, Michelangelo did drafts and studies. So why can't I?
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
> Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into. Yeah...but the other side of that depends on what the definition of “dodgy” is. For example, say we have a server-based app. If the DB schema is badly-designed (usually overcomplicated), then we are truly pooched, as we’ll start to figure that out after we have a few thousand users. If the DB design is OK, even if it is primitive and simple, then we can have naive, problematic code, yet plenty of room to grow. I’ve learned to design for the unknown. It’s really paid off, for me, but YMMV.

aliakhtar 6y ago

Here's my ugly duckling: naminus.com

sillysaurusx 6y ago
Clickable: https://naminus.com/ https://naminus.com/ I tried entering "tpu" which broke it. :) But then I tried "test" which worked. Nice site!

jzer0cool 6y ago

> One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. I see this more concisely written as: One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work __is the fear is fear itself__ Anyone have some examples? I have some. * For example, not taking a job upon offer, for fear of failing. * I witness some mananger's/companies inducing fear, rather than embrace failure as one of the options. Without enabling high risk, high reward, people settle for safer low risk and mediocre results. I think some of the best works also results from beginners. They add the new perspective needed & creative flair as new source of input.

watt 6y ago
Are you this good going from abstract to practical? I know I am not. For me the it's a revelation that _fear itself_ actually is _fear of making something lame_. So, I don't really see the value of expressing this "concisely" because if will never arrive from A to B, if A is abstract pattern. Though once you have shown me that A is equivalent to B (the practical), I do agree, A is equivalent to B. But, unless you show me B upfront, just concisely stating A to me is of no value: I can not make the connection from Abstract to Practical. Only from practical (something lame) to maybe abstract (fear itself). This is also why I don't really buy in to the whole "conciseness" thing - I prefer things spelled out. I suspect many others do too.
- jzer0cool 6y ago
  There are many kinds of fear. Sure, lameness could be one. But I think it is rooted in fear of something else. Fear of failure. Fear of judgement. Fear of mistakes. ... I would argue lameness (as those listed here above) are still abstract. Are you saying you cannot move towards defining and understanding what is causing the fear when you create something lame?

alexashka 6y ago

> One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. No, the biggest thing holding people back from doing great work is resources. Everything else is a distant concern. Remember what Y Combinator does? It connects people with resources, to people who claim they'll do great work. Good, boring, mundane redistribution of resources from old rich people to young capable people. Good, do more of that and please spare us your 'wisdom' - it leads to bullshit artists whose sole skill is 'appreciating' your 'wisdom' to insert themselves into the process and ruin the whole thing.

mikewarot 6y ago
I think he had it right... the thing holding most people back is fear, most of the time. It's only after you get past the fear, does the need for more resources come into play.
dang 6y ago
YC adds resources to people who are already making something. It may not be what they'll end up with (Segment, recently acquired, started with an entirely different idea) but they've started. In the passage you quoted, PG is talking about an earlier stage than that. ("They're too frightened even to start.")
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
lowkeynthorough 6y ago
I think you almost hit the nail on the head.. it’s like a paraphrase of that saying about genius vs talent.. the difference between good work and great work is.. good work takes resources, but properly great work surprises us with how little it takes..

nilpunning 6y ago

"It also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident." You do not need to cultivate this personality trait in our culture. Far more people go too far with this than not far enough, myself included. Overconfident people believe they know more than they actually do, so they are more eager to criticize your novel idea. This is the type of thinking Graham says he wants to avoid in earlier paragraphs. Instead of cultivating overconfidence through the deadly sin of pride, we should cultivate increasing true confidence through the cardinal virtue of courage. You can build your confidence by taking greater and greater courageous action. Courage is the choice to confront pain, ridicule, and the unknown all for an uncertain reward. Graham says, "being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own." Acting courageously does this much, much better. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if Graham agreed. The rest of the essay does a pretty good job explaining how to go about acting courageously, just without using the word.

linguistbreaker 6y ago
This reminds me of the saying that the three virtues of a great programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris.
sergeykish 6y ago
Yes, Get Things Done, iterate. Overconfidence hurts when reality catches. Low expectations helps to recover.

geocrasher 6y ago

If you aren't embarrassed by your previous work, then you're not growing. Don't let little things like failure or poor quality stop you from trying. This is normal. Embrace it, learn, and keep doing things.

saagarjha 6y ago
I think embarrassment really comes from writing code that you thought was great and then you look back at it and read it and it's too confident for it's own good. Learning is a gradual process–I'm almost never embarrassed by the code I wrote in the past, but that's not because that code is perfect; it's just that I made the best choices I could at the time, and made sure to know enough to identify what I didn't know back then. Embarrassment stems out of not knowing what you don't know and acting on that.

zuhayeer 6y ago

"To start a painting saying that it's just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it's just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it to something more" Another reason to have lower standards initially is so you can properly measure the intensity of a problem. The harder your product is to use, the better the gauge for how much people truly want it. Either a) people use your product despite its shoddiness or b) people complain about what more they want And if people don't do either, well then it was just a "quick hack" to keep iterating from.

tppiotrowski 6y ago

The reason many hope you'll succeed is that they hope to rise with you. With investors this incentive is particularly explicit. They want you to succeed because they hope you'll make them rich in the process. I'm more cynical. Investors benefit from the illusion of success, whether it is real or not. They can invest in something they don't think will succeed if PR and marketing can increase the valuation.

ksdale 6y ago
This is true, but they would all prefer the real version to the illusion, and as an entrepreneur, you know if it's all smoke and mirrors or not, so it doesn't really matter if the investor believes in you or not, as long as they earnestly support you.

jodrellblank 6y ago

> "The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could." OK nothing happens without optimism and work and cynically excluding everything will leave you with nowhere to go, but the solution to that can't be optimistically including everything. If you want to lose lots of money, look at the penny stock market and think of all the ways those companies could become massive instead of looking for reasons they won't. Think of all the reasons alterntive cancer treatments could work, all the reasons UFOs could exist, all the reasons giving money to the local mega-church could be a good idea. It's way to easy for most of us to convince ourselves of the happy path of a bunch of nonsense, and it's cynicism which keeps us away from the worst excesses of woo and hype and being conned or abused. It's easy to think of reasons online grocery delivery "could work" during COVID19 in 2020, but if you were doing that in 1999 and investing in Webvan you'd have lost everything. Webvan "could work" and you could have thought of many reasons why, and you would have lost all your money. The people thinking why it couldn't work saved their bacon. Boo.com online fashion in 1999, the people thinking why it couldn't work saved their money and time and effort, even though online clothes shopping totally could work and does today. Or that thinking of reasons why you could learn painting is irrelevant if you don't want to spend your time painting. You may as well rule it out first instead of challenging yourself all the ways you could become good at it and fit it into your life.

ratonroy 6y ago

GCA10 1 day ago [–] I like Graham's points about overconfidence, peer groups and (judicious amounts of) ignorance, all of which he champions quite strongly. But drilling deeper on "rate of change" is an undervalued element that deserves a closer look. The best innovators are really good at taking Version 1.0 and figuring out what rework will turn it into a better 2.0, and then 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, etc. This is an identifiable skill! It can be cultivated. Once you've got it, the failings of Version 1.0 do not ruin your self-esteem. You just get to work on fixing them. And not enough people think about this systematically. One of my favorite museum stops of all time was the British Library, where a glass case held Paul McCartney's first draft of "Yesterday." You could see, cross-out by cross-out, how a somewhat awkward ballad got turned into a pop classic.

lowkeynthorough 6y ago

I think there is a kind of blind spot, if not contradiction, in the essay. It could be a good kind of paradox like the immovable object vs irresistible force thing.. it’s the paradox of lisp, of bel, of Julia, of mit style hacking.. they MIGHT aspire to be good jokes but as far as I can see they are at best, some kind of inside joke.. it’s a special kind of lame.. maybe we shouldn’t ask whether jokes can be ambitious but whether ambitions can be truly hysterically funny