19 ms·
Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status
- onion2k 6y agoMany, many more people work at things other people think are silly and insignificant only to discover that thing is silly and insignificant and then they give up. Occasionally the opposite happens and the person succeeds. If you only look at the successes it probably looks like a willingness to be low-status is a marker for success, but it really isn't. It tells you nothing of the future outcome. The only thing it predicts is a lack of understanding of survivorship bias.
- msandford 6y agoIt's probably necessary but not sufficient. If you can't deal with being low status you won't get through the grind and the suck. But there are a million grinds that don't go anywhere. Look at what it takes to level up a character.
- alextheparrot 6y agoThe necessary condition seems to be invalidated by the “family-tradition” narrative where someone goes directly from son of a 4* general to becoming a 2* general as long as they don’t mess up too badly. For them, their default amount of status can lead to success as long as they don’t put too many chips on the wrong games. I’m not actually sure how true that is in practice, but the stickiness of income bracket and legacy enrollment in universities seems to give some credence to this type of construction.
- dahfizz 6y agoIncome brackets are not as sticky as you might think[1]. If you are in the second or third quintile, you are more likely to move income quintiles than stay where you are over ten years. If you are in the bottom quintile, you only have a 64% chance of staying there. That's not incredible, but it does make you question the "inescapable poverty" narrative when a full 1/3 of impoverished people escape it every decade. Across every income quintile, you are more likely to die richer than your father[2]. [1] https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-and-events/publications/economic-commentary/2016-economic-commentaries/ec-201606-income-inequality-and-mobility.aspx https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-and-events/publicat... [2] https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2013/march/us-economic-mobility-dream-data/ https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoPerhaps. But the trends are not encouraging. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwards-decline-usa-us-america-economics/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...
- srtjstjsj 6y agoThe "success" OP seems to be referring to is all top quintile, not a kid who stays off drugs and stays in school and goes to college and gets a good trade or a white collar job. Anyway, "dying richer than your father" is extremely different for the bottom quintile than the top, which shouldn't be equivocated. When half of people stay near where they are born in wealth, it's pretty clear that there is a massively unlevel playing field.
- indigochill 6y agoI think underlying that there is actually a similar root in both cases: the old adage "It's not what you know, but who you know" (or perhaps more precisely, who knows you). In the son-of-a-general instance, the son is born into those connections. But if you are able to associate yourself with high-level decision makers in a relevant low-status role, that can pay off. I've done this twice, once as a marketing intern at a news startup where our CEO connected me with some decision-makers in the journalism industry (though I decided I didn't like the journalism industry), and again when I got my foot in the door as a customer support rep at a tech company to leverage my software development skills into a dev job with no relevant professional experience or education.
- alextheparrot 6y agoI’m actually a bit unsure how to think of status in a generic sense. The reason that is important is because I feel like we’re talking about the same thing, just at different resolutions. That idea is based on thinking of status as a combination of <connections, culture, wealth> or something of that nature, either accrued or inherited. One could think of the “don’t mess up too badly” as “dad’s friends will still interact with me in public”, which is just a proxy for connections as you mentioned. Going from low to high status is definitely made easier by leveraging high status individuals. Lower, but not necessarily low, status is still expected, I think, as the son of the general still goes to West Point and proves themselves in lower-status roles like being a lieutenant - the gears are just greased to keep going.
- dmos62 6y agoI agree, but being willing to be [insert whatever] can be indicative of a more general flexibility, which is an important trait to have. Probably not what the author of the quote meant, though.
- onion2k 6y agoThe opposite hypothesis, about someone unwilling to work in a low-status role, is almost certainly a strong indicator of future failure in startups. Every founder I know has tales of having to do the crappy jobs that had to be done in order to make the business succeed.
- vagrantJin 6y agoNassim Taleb would approve of your POV.
- purple-again 6y agoI love perpetual motion machines. Absolutely fascinated by them. I am quick to dump on flat earthers and antivaxxers and understand the science against perpetual motion just as well. That said, given a strong UBI or a grant of a billion dollars I would GLEEFULLY spend the rest of my life working on trying to build a perpetual motion machine. Sometimes we just have to remember that if we are honest with ourselves we are not as rational as we would like to believe.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoAren't you actually asking for a grant to be an installation artist working in the field of pretty moving machines. I don't think society should fund research into the flatness of the earth or perpetual motion, but I do think there is plenty of scope for making beautiful things. Especially if you explain it gleefully when you unveil your latest :-)
- purple-again 6y agoI’m afraid no one would define any of my attempts so far as pretty except to call them pretty bad! That’s actually a great idea though, I could probably reduce the money sink a bit by trying to them some of my projects into art work. Thanks for sharing that idea!
- im3w1l 6y agoThere is serious work happening on building perpetual motion machines of the third kind (one that moves forever but does not produce energy). But to contribute to that work takes years of serious study. It's probably a good idea to do that study in a formal setting to avoid fooling yourself into thinking you understand when you don't.
- rileymat2 6y agoAlthough impossible, I wonder if striving for perpetual motion could lead to discoveries to create very efficient machines? So may be worth funding.
- agumonkey 6y agoI think there's a special talent into feeling insignificant activities and to quickly enough turn them into 'added value'. Otherwise yeah you can pack burgers every day and stay at that level if you want. But some will make more, find more customers, more venues, new ideas. The growth spirit maybe ? I don't know.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y agoThat's trying to elevate a task to significance. That seems more an unwillingness to let the insignificant remain insignificant.
- maxerickson 6y agoIt's not what the tweet is saying, but being willing to admit you got something wrong is very valuable, and some people refuse to do it for (more or less) status reasons.
- jkinudsjknds 6y agoMy anecdata would suggest that refusing to acknowledge fault and instead reframing the context is a far more effective strategy, and yet neither are good predictors of success.
- iagovar 6y agoThis is the correct answer.
- abnry 6y agoThere's probably also the matter of competition. If something is considered significant and important, there won't be much low hanging fruit. If something is considered silly or insignificant, there are fewer people working on the same thing and an increased likelihood you'll be able to contribute something substantial.
- RIMR 6y agoYeah, but in the end you still have something that is considered silly and insignificant, so there's still an uphill battle to success.
- candu 6y agoYes - there is likely a "high-risk, high-reward" dynamic here, which is entirely consistent with both your and OP's descriptions: the long tail will toil uselessly, while the lucky few will a) discover that they were right about its significance, b) be in a position to explore and articulate that significance, and c) find themselves suddenly at the top of a new field with few competitors. On the other hand: there's a second interpretation of all this, which is that doing just about anything big - a major product launch, a body of research, etc. - involves a lot of drudgery. In other words, even big significant things involve a lot of work that looks silly / insignificant. I would agree that learning to commit to that drudgery, and to see it as necessary and even occasionally enjoyable (or at least meditative), is essential to reach a positive outcome. (Which is not to say that all drudgery has value, or that we shouldn't still seek to reduce / manage toil over time: it's also possible to fall into the trap of assuming all drudgery is of equal value, which it definitely is not.)
- dathinab 6y agoBut without willingness you also wouldn't have succeed as you would have stopped long before succeeding. So while it does not make you successful it removes one potential reason of failing to become successful.
- dcolkitt 6y agoYou could say the thing about risk tolerance. Many, many more people gamble and play the lottery than start a business. Yet I think it'd be pretty hard to deny that the willing to take risks is almost always a pre-condition to outsized success.
- ARandomerDude 6y agoI know a successful doctor who's convinced software development is an inherently unstable, unprofessional, and boring career. I really like the guy but I couldn't disagree more with him about this issue. I bring this up to say: what other people think is significant career-wise is really only a helpful opinion if it's informed. Outsiders (friends, family, etc.) may have helpful questions but they often just don't have enough information to help you decide when to give up or press on.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI'd stress the informed part. Career prospects may look much differently on the outside than they do from the inside. A common example I see is wondering if and when programming will be automated away. These questions come from ingesting the hype surrounding AI. So unless you're inside the industry, or have someone from inside explain things to you, you'll have a mistaken perspective on the future of software careers, thanks to the ongoing barrage of marketer lies. I imagine it's the same for other industries.
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- OJFord 6y ago> so many of the top people I've met were uniquely Yes! We are all individuals!
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- bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y agoIt must be exhausting to have 'status' rolling around in your head at all as you go about your life. And by "it must be exhausting" I mean, "it seems extremely pointless, unwise, and indicative of a deficient character."
- jjk166 6y agoDon't pan for gold, sell shovels.
- forinti 6y agoDon't be sales manager at Shovels R Us, open your own little shovel shop.
- Der_Einzige 6y agoBRB trying to work for home depot now
- roenxi 6y agoThe more-correct observation is that any well-understood or easy path to becoming high status will be shut down. Most people are not high status, and want to be. It follows that the path has to be either risky, or difficult to comprehend. If hard work were enough, we'd all be in charge. Lots of hard workers out there.
- spicymaki 6y agoWhat about just pure chance? To be born in to the right family, in the right country, to be in the correct field, to have the right idea at the right time. Perhaps the correct path is just luck. We are all rolling the dice here. Just be yourself and do what you find interesting. If it pays off great, if it doesn't that is okay too.
- Sebb767 6y agoChance/Luck is surely involved, but I'd argue that you can make it far easier for luck to find you. If you get a degree in an upcoming field or start a company you're not guaranteed anything, but your chances are a lot better than if you're just slacking off. Sure, at the end it's a dice role, but you can get a better dice ;)
- matthewmacleod 6y agoIf you get a degree in an upcoming field or start a company you're not guaranteed anything, but your chances are a lot better than if you're just slacking off. But your chances of being able to do that in the first place are massively dependent on your luck. It's a lot harder to get a degree or start a company if your family is struggling to afford essentials, or you're caring for a sick relative.
- boredumb 6y agoJust wait until you hear the chances these people had to luck out on in order to become an embryo.
- bluedays 6y agoYeah, 33 years old, haven't accomplished much, went into school to start a degree in programming, still low status and can't find a job anywhere. I'm not sure willingness is the word for this. All I feel is bitterness. I'm not sure if this is me being reflective because it's my birthday today or what, but I'm so fucking sick of working so hard to get nowhere.
- ecshafer 6y agoFWIW Junior level jobs are by far the hardest jobs to get. They are the fewest openings, with the most applicants. And tech companies basically all use the same leetcode white boarding interviews that aren't representative of actually working. My unsolicited advice would be: Continue working on improving, apply to jobs where-ever you can, try to get experience somewhere (work with a professor, make your own startup, go on fiverr, anything).
- mrleiter 6y agoHappy birthday mate! :) hope you will find success soon, whatever it may mean to you.
- spacemanmatt 6y agoI am sorry the market is such crap for you. I would best describe my career as "clawing my way to the middle" while learning that economic class (the one I was born into) has had an outsized influence over my whole life. That was helpful for separating my actual enjoyment of engineering and development from an industry I've learned to resent. Best of luck to you.
- afandian 6y agoHappy birthday! There's plenty of time. And whatever setbacks you have in 2020 aren't your fault.
- javiramos 6y agoYeah, 2020 has been a tough year for everyone
- _qulr 6y agoThis is nothing more than a month old tweet from some random person with generic advice and zero empirical evidence to back it up. Why is this even on Hacker News?
- throwawaylolx 6y agoIt's like Reddit raided HN today.
- hello_friendos 6y agoHackernews seems to like two kinds of posts. Interesting posts that get into the weeds of a specific topic. And the kind of pseudo-inspirational posts you see on Linkedin
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- dr-detroit 6y agoThats funny you mention that I just read a sports article that was a few sentences linking together a series of atheletes' tweets to attempt to inform me of what happened yesterday in a sporting event. I think twitter killed journalism bro.
- germinalphrase 6y agoSometimes things rise on HN because of the conversation rather than the linked content itself.
- tucif 6y agoRecently a lot of tweets in the front page, 5 tweets on the frontpage on the same day even just last week[1] Can't help but think hn now showing the username for some domains including twitter is increasing the submissions somehow? Or maybe people just engage more in discussion around tweets lately. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-10-15 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-10-15
- spacemanmatt 6y agoThis fits with my experience that low-ego people are better to work with and low-ego teams tend to thrive more often. I think it's important to separate status and authority deriving from other authorities compared with status and authority earned fairly in the eyes group/team members, though.
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- fredley 6y agoI know people blocked by this. Usually they're people who had an easy time at expensive schools, they now can't accept that they're anything other than brilliant and deserve the top jobs based on their raw 'talent' alone. Those who can work their way up from the unglamorous positions at the bottom are the ones doing well, and often leapfrog those with an easier starting position due to it.
- TheButlerian 6y agoUsually the ones at the expensive schools have the connections go get well paid managerial jobs and have the hard workers break their backs for them.
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- quadrifoliate 6y agoThis can be differently phrased as "privilege to be low-status". If you are an underrepresented minority and spend years working in a low-status position, the likelihood of a payoff for you is much lesser than it is for someone who typically doesn't experience discrimination based on their age, race, or gender. The downside for spending those years for some people is much higher than others. A social safety net can de-risk this somewhat, but the US doesn't have a meaningful one. So really, the "willingness to be low-status" often just means "coming from a background that's high-status enough that being low-status for a few years will not significantly damage their financial prospects".
- zcw100 6y agoAnd then drone on and on about the reason people aren't more successful is because they don't take more risks.
- sgt101 6y agoThis is a good meme to use to keep direct reports quiet at work. Show them this and tell them that if they continue working in the ditch all will be well in the end!
- thom 6y agoI'm struggling to see the link between status and working on something obscure. Working on something you like (or even having a choice of things to work on at all), even if it's something others find trivial or pointless, still seems like a privilege.
- macawfish 6y agoI think in this case, they're using the word "status" to refer more to how people might perceive someone relative to certain societal norms, whereas privilege is more about the basic abilities or advantages someone has because of their "socioeconomic status". The tweet thread is using the word "status" a little differently than a sociologist might use it when talking about "socioeconomic status".
- thom 6y agoI understand that, I just mean the two are related: I think lots of pastimes of billionaires are silly, for example, but the fact they have the money and time to do them is a sign of status. If I can go off and spend years on some ‘silly’ project, I’m probably not worrying about putting food on the table, and therefore must have achieved some degree of status.
- gwbas1c 6y agoI interpreted this to mean that someone toiling through the ranks of an organization "keeping the lights on" is more likely to be successful that someone who specifically tries to get a leadership role in an organization. Or, someone who enters politics by joining local committees, volunteering to help other candidates, and maybe running for an "insignificant" office will have more success than someone who enters politics by running for mayor, governor, or president as their first endeavor. But, more specifically, I interpret "looking like they're working on something silly or insignificant" to basically mean finding tasks that are critical for the survival of the organization; but might not come with the prestige of a leadership title.
- thom 6y ago
- giantg2 6y agoI'm low-status. I work on stuff that may never payoff. I will never be successful, and that's ok. I was even told by a manager in my 1-on-1 that not everyone has the potential to be more than a midlevel dev. Also, this low-staus thing is not a great predictor. The hard work that is mentioned is prevalent in many of the studies looking at success. Of course this is part of a matrix of qualities.
- UK-Al05 6y agoThat or you can become a mid-level manager...
- giantg2 6y agoI'm not qualified. I'd have to jump through about 2 promotions to get into a position where I can post to that level.
- username90 6y agoHow is being a midlevel dev low status?
- UK-Al05 6y agoIt's pretty much 1 above the bottom rung in tech companies.
- giantg2 6y agoThat, and nobody listens to my ideas or opinions. I'm always stuck building someone else's (management's) half-baked idea. It'd be nice if I were at least a part of the strategy and design discussions. I'm tired of being told to think outside the box only to be put down when I do.
- FiberBundle 6y agoHas anybody else noticed that negative posts are almost always the most upvoted posts on any kind of success related topic on hn? These posts always mention survivorship bias, which admittedly is in most cases a valid point, but I find it kind of disturbing how in a startup community risk taking is almost completely frowned upon. The Twitter post captures the Startup sentiment fairly well, if you want to do something exceptional you have to be willing to accept that the probability of you never succeeding is quite large and therefore accepting a low status, possibly for your entire life, is something you have to be OK with.
- drchiu 6y agoI wished I learned earlier in my life that hard work and success don't come hand-in-hand. There are a lot of hard working people in the world who never get to reap any reward from their labour. At least for me, recognizing that success is nice, but not getting too hung up on it (or expecting it) and to enjoy the labour itself (and find fulfillment in it) helps.
- draw_down 6y agoHmm, I agree with your first observation. But that always just made me want to be one of the people who are successful but don’t work very hard.
- chasd00 6y agoI hear a lot of people lament that the American dream is dead because they worked hard but still don't have the riches the thought they would have. I never understood that, I can dig holes in my backyard all day every day and that would be very hard work but it gets me no where. To me, hard work and success are just correlated in the way ice cream sales and murder rates are correlated.
- chadash 6y agoOnly a small fraction of people with high net worths, say $50M+, are coming from founding venture backed startups. Many of the wealthiest people I've met do things like manufacture purses for Walmart, or towels for TJ Maxx, or sell network equipment to cable companies. Stuff that isn't sexy or visible, but with large markets that can get you into the very well off range (but that limit you from being a multi-billionaire).
- curiousllama 6y agoAgree. "Silly or insignificant" is the wrong angle. "Pushing a boulder up a hill" is my preferred framing. Better to talk about difficulty, uncertainty, and boredom. All those things will make you low status - choosing to be sisyphus isn't glamorous - but that's also where you find valuable niches. Not in the silly.
- xiphias2 6y agoThe most expensive display of status that I see around my friends is having a new car. I have a 12 year old beautiful BMW that was created just after the design refresh. It's expensive to maintain, but far not as much as buying a new car. My friends are trying to pressure me to upgrade it to a newer one, but I see that just as money going out of the window that goes to compound investment right now. Also in the US I listen to Dave Ramsey callers, and there are lots of people whose car is worth more than their whole net worth, which is totally unjustifiable in my view.
- bittercynic 6y agoFancy cars seem like an inefficient flex. It's so easy to get a huge loan for a car that you'd end up doing enormous economic damage to yourself to get a car half as good as the broke guy whose only financial goal is to have a fancy car. May as well drive an old corolla or prius and save your cash.
- bartread 6y agoI'm not sure I'd equate "low status" with "working on something silly or insignificant" (real or perceived). These things seem unrelated. It's entirely possible to be low status and working on something incredibly important. E.g., driving a lorry to collect rubbish and recycling: nobody thinks of that as a high status job but imagine what happens if people stop doing it, and see if you can then still convince yourself that it's not an important job. It's also possible to do such a job for your entire working life and never taste "success". In fact, I would imagine that's possibly the default case. This in turn suggests that "low status" is an incredibly poor predictor of success. Also, look at how rife poverty is across the globe. Poor people tend to be "low status", and many of them stay that way for their entire lives. Talking about their status as a "predictor of success" seems incredibly tone-deaf to me. Overall this comment seems ridiculously ill thought out, to the point where I'm wondering how it's ended up here on the front page. To the person who wrote it: please, for your own benefit as much as anybody else's, step outside your bubble, because staying there is breaking your ability to think clearly.
- dalbasal 6y ago>> I'm not sure I'd equate "low status" with "working on something silly or insignificant" Their not identical, but one does interact with another. In the context of an individual (not a global or social context), heterodox choices tend to be the less status oriented choices. It's tone deaf because it relates to breakthrough success, and heterodox chance taking is tends to be a privileged prerogative. That doesn't make it untrue.
- ceedan 6y agoSounds like grit.
- RIMR 6y ago"I never predicted that anyone I know would become extremely successful. I guess successful people can be predicted by observing how unsuccessful they look right now". Kinda disheartening to see obvious survivorship bias elevated to the top of HN.
- marchenko 6y agoIf this were true, and significant, wouldn't we expect to see more successful women in the startup scene? Women appear to be disproportionately willing to do low-status/non public-facing/schlep work, but I don't notice that they are particularly rewarded for it, probably because they tend do this low-status work in the context of an existing organization in which they have little leverage/ownership stake. Willingness to take risks, and having the means to do so (financial and social capital reserved to draw down upon), on the other hand, seems to better fit the observed pattern.
- jpxw 6y ago> Women appear to be disproportionately willing to do low-status/non public-facing/schlep work I don’t think this is true at all.
- marchenko 6y agoWomen have tended to be over-represented in "support" rather than "line" positions within firms. Maybe it's more historically accurate to say that they are more likely to be tasked with this work. But they do not appear to be rewarded for taking it on. I think low-status is a complete red herring here. Someone with the right background can spend years tinkering on a project without suffering too much status loss, because they have other reserves of capital. It's like the genteel poverty of the grad student, but for founders.
- paulsutter 6y agoFolks in the status professions (banking, law,..) often tell me they want to become an entrepreneur. I always tell them, you wont do it. They attended the right school, joined the right firm, attained that corner office. As a founder they would give up all that, and their family and friends will tell them that they've made a massive mistake, for years, while it appears that nothing is happening. Then they sheepishly admit that this is true. As a bootstrapped founder when I was younger, even dating was awkward. People considered me to be quasi-unemployed, despite working 80 hours a week. It's really hard to do if you're thirsty for status.
- ianai 6y agoNo no no, tell them they CAN be an entrepreneur by just giving you $MONEY for $IDEA with $LAX legal terms. Edit-But more seriously - I totally agree. It is infinitely more difficult to accept a low position for that long to the point of impossibility for many already otherwise established.
- ackbar03 6y agoYes I can totally agree with this, and it can be amplified by your environment, especially in HK where we're pretty much all slaves to our mortgages. I worked in ib and actually quit after I was relocated to Shanghai. My colleagues were a lot more understanding because you could actually feel the pace of technological change a lot more acutely than in a place like Hong Kong. But still most of them would never have the guts to do it themselves, they lose too much for a totally uncertain future and probably wouldn't make it anyways. And yea I also lived like a bum for a few years after that but I never really cared as much for fine food or whatever it is stuffy banker types lived for anyways
- bumby 6y agoThis reminds me of the book "Excellent Sheep" that spoke to the point that much of elite schools is about chasing status. I couldn't find the exact number, but an absurd percentage of graduates go into a select few high prestige career choices, namely finance, consulting, law, and medicine. The point being students are optimizing for high status. To paraphrase an interaction from the book about entertaining different paths, when pressed a student made it clear: "We've known who we want to be from elementary school. We are the type to get into <<Ivy League School Name>>". I sometimes wonder if people focus on chasing status when they're at a loss for defining any other concrete goal. When you aren't sure what you want, it's easy to let society define your goal which manifests itself as chasing status.
- kweinber 6y agoAbility to be under-paid or under-appreciated for the work is the real predictor here. That's why startups are a rich-person's game. The people who succeed by being "low-status" for a long time aren't really low-status at all. . . they are high-status in other ways and can afford to let their start-up garden grow because their sense of self-worth, and income aren't totally tied to it.
- kstenerud 6y agoOr far more likely: Most revolutionary breakthroughs are first viewed as silly / insignificant. If they were easily recognisable for what they are, they'd have been discovered already (low hanging fruit). All of my successful ideas started this way. It's not a willingness to be low-status; it's a willingness to persevere in the face of ridicule/obscurity while ALSO having an actually good idea that you have a chance of successfully iterating on. The only difference between visionary and batshit crazy is success.
- jgilias 6y agoThe Twitter thread explores some ideas why this may be the case. However, quickly skimming through it, they miss the most obvious one. For the people who are busy working on something they find important, most often 'status' is not even a thing. So there's no 'willingness' really to it, it's just that status doesn't really exist. The way they see themselves and how they measure their success has literally nothing to do with what perceptions other people might have about them. And then, sure, eventually some of them end up being pretty successful also by other people's standards.
- veddox 6y ago> For the people who are busy working on something they find important, most often 'status' is not even a thing. I'd slightly modify that to say that what they were doing was more important to them than status - which isn't the same as saying they didn't care about status at all. I read a number of biographies of great US presidents in the last year, and found it fascinating to see that pretty much all of them were intensely ambitious. What made the difference is that they ultimately cared more about the people they served than about serving their own ego.
- mattgreenrocks 6y ago> I'd slightly modify that to say that what they were doing was more important to them than status - which isn't the same as saying they didn't care about status at all. Agree. I refer to this as meaningful work. It can be difficult to describe to others why it is important, but it is important to them at that time. The joy of such work is that status does not weigh upon it as much as other endeavors. I suspect some of this success reverse-engineering efforts sometimes runs ramshod over non-extrinsic motivations because they're not as apparent, especially to the authors of such pieces.
- probe 6y agoWhose biographies did you read and what else did you learn from this study? Sounds like a fun adventure
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- asciimov 6y agoIt takes some kind of privilege to believe that being low-status is a status onto itself.
- username90 6y agoIt is about putting off rewards. If you are fine with living low status for a while you will probably do better than someone who refuses to do it. For example a senior software engineer who refuses to do whiteboard coding since it is "beneath him" only hurts himself, he cares more about his current status than future earnings and status.
- barrenko 6y agoBasic Taoism, the way of the trickster sage. Going the roundabout way to get what was inacessible via a direct route.
- halfnormalform 6y agoLaotze wasn’t really a trickster, that was Chuangtze. Mid-grade Taoism.
- lioeters 6y agoThe supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to. It is content with the low places that people disdain. Thus it is like the tao. ... Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.
- ngvrnd 6y agoa lowly position is a great boon
- andi999 6y agoAny scientific bases or just made out of thin air and anecdotal evidence?
- BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y agoBut this is a selection fallacy. 99% of those who look like they work on something silly, DO work on something silly and will never become top people.
- brightball 6y agoA friend of mine falls into this perfectly. As an incredible developer who was great with clients, he took an entry level university dev job just to get insurance and stability. Within 2 years he was promoted to running 5 technical departments.
- foxtr0t 6y agoApply this to everything not just your day job. People who know how to fix things that break, improve things like their house, fix their car, their neighbor's fence, etc tend to be more well rounded. Doing physical labor should be below nobody. Buy nice things and make lots of money, sure, but also make sure you work with your hands from time to time. This helps me stay grounded and humble. I think many people could use this advice. FWIW I work as a SWE at a FANG, presumably a "high or upper middle class" job.
- chansiky 6y agoA lot of people simply can't handle the cognitive dissonance that pangs the mind when they are lower status than they were before. Cognitive dissonance creates undue mental stress until resolved. If one can't resolve it by deflating their ego, then the dissonance between reality and one's self perception won't allow them to stay in a position of low status for very long. Thus they get stuck in relative peaks, unable to descend from their high position, to start fresh from a point that allows them to climb the right peak.
- chmod600 6y agoI'll always remember growing up when we moved from a big house (2000 sq ft) to a little apartment (700 sq ft). My parents didn't lose their jobs, maybe a few expensive things hit but really there was no obvious reason to an outsider. We could have stayed in the big house and gotten by. But our family wasn't in great financial shape. Small expenses became debts, parents always fighting or stressed about money, just general family stress. Classic stretched middle class family, perhaps a bit more than others. But we moved anyway, and it was great. Stress went down, and as each of us turned 16 my parents bought us (cheap) cars and we started working. Sharing rooms was annoying but really didn't impact us much. Lower stress was great, and a little pressure to get jobs got all of us a head start on working and paying for stuff (gas, insurance, fast food, cell phones, outings with friends) during high school. We are all successful and happy today. But I bet a lot of people thought we were losers when we left the big house. And if we had waited until we HAD to leave the big house, we would be losers.
- mattgreenrocks 6y agoThat's a great lesson to learn at a time when you are impressionable. There's a lot of perspective to be gained from being at different levels of status, and seeing that life really isn't that different. IME, like a lot of life, there's a tension: you need to be willing and able to work hard (often without recognition), able to accept the rewards that may come from that work, but also able to not hold too tightly to those rewards. I hope I can teach and model this lesson well for my son.
- reducesuffering 6y agoWas this a 4 person family in a 2 bedroom apartment?
- chmod600 6y ago5 people in two bedrooms, youngest 14, so it was a bit tight. But honestly I don't remember it as a problem. I was a teenager and more concerned with other stuff. The point is not that the living condiitions were bad. They weren't. We had what we needed and more. The point is that my parents were wise enough to cast off the things that didn't matter before they were forced to, and focus on what did matter. They didn't care what the neighbors or friends or aunts and uncles thought. How many people willingly drop themselves down a few rungs on the social ladder for anything? Even for stuff that matters much more, like their family's financial security, happiness, and freedom?
- maverickJ 6y agoBeing willing to be in a low status role that either grants you an opportunity to learn quickly or an opportunity to solve hard problems is a super power in my opinion. Nikola Tesla is one of the greatest inventors in recent memories and he had this gift. His first job under Edison in America had a not so glamorous title. I actually wrote about it in https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/take-the-role-and-prove-yourself https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/take-the-role-and-pr... On the flip side, being comfortable staying in a low status role over a long period of time where the role does not provide opportunities for learning and doing hard things might be a sign of lack of ambition.
- diob 6y agoI'm more interested in the next logical question. Why are those folks willing to be low-status? I'd be willing to bet a good chunk of change that it's because they have a support system. Folks without that know they need to achieve at least a modicum of success because there's no one to help them in case it doesn't work out. So they settle for placing a reasonable bet as opposed to betting "everything".
- pmiller2 6y agoSo, where's the link to the paper showing this? Or, are we just reposting peoples' opinions on Twitter as discussion topics on HN now? If so, plz delete my account, kthanxbye.
- namelosw 6y agoIt makes sense to if you are in a moderate or high status white-collar and seriously thinking about pursuing your own lifetime-goal. You have to give up the 'easy' way of life you currently have to trade for some success rate for your own goal. To practice this and it makes more sense. I recently quit my decent job despite I was doing great. I spent a while to fully-convince myself, and I realize I don't really care about status, and wasn't feeling I was achieving anything. But I live in a relatively judgemental country. When I communicate this idea with my collegues many wouldn't understand it. When I communicate with my parent I recieve immediate objection, then I receive quit some interruptive phone calls from them telling me go back to work. In practice it take more to be low-status.
- happyjack 6y agoMan, I see that this conversation has gone a lot of different directions in the comments. Everything from work / life balance to Ivy League schools, etc. Everyone from an early age is fed a lot of information regarding all this stuff. Your parents, the ZIP code you grew up in, to the public or private places you were educated or dropped out from. The truth is, it takes all kinds and success is defined 8 billion ways by 8 billion different people on this planet. I think one thing that is interesting about tech (I don't work in tech, and I'm not a programmer) is the entrepreneur / start up culture. Maybe it has something to do with the cap nature of the beast (all you have to do is code and rent a server) that makes everyone bananas to be "successful" or a "CEO," but I just don't see this in other industries. Sure, other industries have entrepreneurs and people who start their own thing. But is it SO much different in this tech world. It's a cultural phenomena. It's more or less a function of time. No matter how hard I worked, I could never start a chemical refinery or build a car company. A new app? Function of time and sweat.