9 ms·
Wrong. Being a quiet professional doesn’t pay off in the real world, aka our market-driven capitalist economy. Soldiers live and function in what is essentiall
by MediaSquirrel 15y ago
Wrong.
Being a quiet professional doesn’t pay off in the real world, aka our market-driven capitalist economy. Soldiers live and function in what is essentially a socialist culture with rigid, strictly enforced rank and class structure. Hence the refrain: “What the hell do you think you are, soldier? An individual!?!”
I’ve lived & worked in paramilitary cultures myself. They all have the same characteristics: Be a quiet professional, don’t make waves, conform, fit in, don’t question authority.
And when you’re getting shot at in Iraq or running around fighting forest fires (like I was), this makes sense.
But in a dynamic, entrepreneurial economy where people all the time come out of nowhere and make a name for themselves, being a quiet professional is sure path to peon-hood or, best case, middle management.
If you want more than the default station in life you've been handed, you gotta make noise and alert the world to your presence, it’s that simple. Either that, or you can play by the rules and hope that the man actually rewards you.
Those SEALs kicking doors, those Marines taking bullets, they do it so that people like you and me have the freedom to make noise, create new things, and maybe, if we’re lucky, make a small dent in the universe.
But they don’t do it so we can be like them; Because their world is more Soviet than anything else in the US of A.
- nostrademons 15y ago"But in a dynamic, entrepreneurial economy where people all the time come out of nowhere and make a name for themselves, being a quiet professional is sure path to peon-hood or, best case, middle management." I am curious - who would you take as exemplars of these people that come out of nowhere and make a name for themselves?
- MediaSquirrel 15y ago-Paul Graham (you might have read one of his essays) -Vincius Vacanti -Jason Calacanis -Chris Dixon -Mark Suster -Fred Wilson -The Twilio Guys -Tim Ferris -Mark Zuckberg -Steve Jobs
- nostrademons 15y agoInteresting. My list would've gone: Larry Page, Steve Wozniak, Robert Tappan Morris, Paul Buchheit, Drew Houston, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the Heroku guys, and a bunch of early Google guys that are so private that I won't embarrass them by putting their names on the Internet. All of those are the consummate Quiet Professionals, and things haven't worked out too badly for them. They certainly aren't stuck in middle-management. I find it interesting that our lists are almost completely disjoint, though, and in many cases I've picked one half of a partnership and you picked the other half. I wonder if people have an innate preference for one strategy or the other based on their personality type, and then they just choose to optimize for whatever they know they'll be good at.
- JanezStupar 15y agoUmm... Larry Page - the same Larry Page that set out on world domination and who frustrated VS's for years before accepting an CEO on his own terms? Steve Wozniak - the guy who couldn't keep his trap shut if his life depended on it to prevent drowning? Others I do not know - but I guess that these guys are anything but quiet professionals (good soldier archetype) waiting to be noticed and given their proper place.
- nostrademons 15y agoQuiet profesional != doormat. The point of the article - and I think that most of the readers here are missing this - is one of focus. A quiet professional focuses on the work. A loudmouth focuses on how the work will make him look. Several of the people on MediaSquirrel's list are consummate loudmouths, eg. every venture Jason Calacanis is involved with seems to be more about Jason Calacanis than the product he's selling, and every book Tim Ferris sells is selling Tim Ferris as much as the book. Larry is the opposite - virtually everything he does is about Google, Google is not about him. He's very media-shy and tends to be distrustful of the press. He believes that the way to get people to sit up and take notice is to simply do useful things better than everybody else does it. Execution, not hype. This is the reason why I can't talk about what I do - Google has a very strong culture about not announcing products until there is actually something that people can play with, and that comes straight from Larry. You can also have a bit of a rebellious streak and still be a quiet professional. Steve Wozniak and Paul Buchheit are two good examples. The key point is that they rebelled by building stuff, not by talking about stuff.
- MediaSquirrel 15y agoAnother great example: 37 Signals. Their product BLOWS!!! It's the web circa 2003. And yet they make so much noise that people still buy their shit anyway.
- edw 15y agoThey have more than one product. Which one, in your considered opinion, BLOWS?
- grantheaslip 15y agoI personally find the way 37signals promote themselves to be often distasteful, but I still pay for Backpack because it does what I need it to do, and almost nothing more. Sure, some of the interface and features feel a bit dated, but no other similar service I've tried is as simple, elegant, and devoid of unnecessary, distracting, fiddly bullshit as Backpack. Honestly, is the fact that it's not a trend surfing web developer's wet dream preventing it from being a useful tool?
- adora 15y agoStay hungry for sure but perhaps simply "stay humble" is the key takeaway from this article.
- MediaSquirrel 15y agoHumble and quiet are not the same.
- urbanjunkie 15y agoThey can be, depending on the context. Words are mutable and fluid.
- JWLong 15y agoOkay, then "stay meek". (a word our society seems to have very much forgotten)
- roel_v 15y agoYou misunderstood the point. It's not about being a shy wall-flower. It's about not being a whiner; about not complaining how hard you have it, how everything is impossible and everybody else is so stupid, and how great you could and would and will be if only everything and everybody else didn't keep you from doing it. It's about forging yourself into a doer rather than a talker, by taking in stride the enormous stress that comes from rising above everybody else.
- MediaSquirrel 15y agoSorry, but my lens is colored by the fact that I have actually been in these "quiet professional" cultures and seen the dark side that comes with the "quiet" in "quiet professional." JFDI––that part I'm on board with. I just don't understand why you need to be quiet about it.
- Swizec 15y ago>You misunderstood the point. It's not about being a shy wall-flower. It's about not being a whiner; about not complaining how hard you have it, how everything is impossible and everybody else is so stupid, and how great you could and would and will be if only everything and everybody else didn't keep you from doing it. Why? What possibly could be the benefit of not complaining about stuff that sucks? Sure, I understand that stuff sucking shouldn't stop you from doing it, but why not complain about it? What's wrong with dissipating the frustration/anger/whatever? Hell, sometimes, if you complain enough, people might actually help and then magically you can achieve more than you could on your own.
- davidw 15y agoYeah, I follow professional bike racing, and... if you think about it, the "product" is entertainment. Winning certainly counts for a lot, but there are other guys who manage to make something of a name for themselves for who they are, how they race, how they talk, and other things that aren't just winning. One guy that comes to mind is Joao Correia, who came back to professional racing in his mid 30ies after losing a lot of weight, something virtually unheard of in the cycling world, where you're either headed for the pro ranks by your early 20ies or you're out. He was a very active writer about his experience, both via longer articles and on twitter. Now he's going to do a book, apparently. By not being quiet, he absolutely helped his own brand, and his team. http://bikechatter.com/main/foruser/32/joaoisme http://bikechatter.com/main/foruser/32/joaoisme
- BvS 15y agoOr just think of Anna Kournikova. Never won a single tournament but still became one of the highest paid tennis stars of her generation.
- Confusion 15y agoActually she was quite an accomplished doubles player and won many tournaments, including a grand slam, as such. They were ranked #1 for a while. Also, becoming no. 8 on the singles world ranking as quite an achievement, even without winning any tournaments.
- edw 15y agoOK, I think I can die now, because, someone just called the military a socialistic culture, which is something I thought I'd never hear. This is even better than my friend, who was educated at University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, believing that the salient attribute of Nazi Germany was its socialism. The opposite of crude, narcissistic individualism is not socialism. I suggest you consult a dictionary. (I don't have a rooster in this cock fight—my politics are a muddle of compassion and get-off-my-lawn-ism and faith in human ingenuity[ism?] and I tend to roll my eyes at anyone either espousing or accusing people of practicing socialism.)
- kmavm 15y agoI grew up in a Marine Corps household, at the height of the Cold War. My father often observed that the military is much more socialist, in the literal sense, than the culture at large: for example, housing, medicine and clothing are not provided by the market. My dad loved the Marine Corps, and loved America's capitalist, individualist culture; however, there is an inherent irony that the military's system is very different from the American system.
- edw 15y agoIn our lives, there are many instances where we organize ourselves in ways that aren't optimized for individual self-aggrandizement. Families are one. I'd say start-ups are another. The sublimation of our own selfish desires for the benefit of another person or for the collective welfare of a larger group happens all the time. A world without such behavior is the stuff of Ayn Rand nuts' masturbation fantasies. I'd never argue that the culture of the military is not, on balance, profoundly different than civilian life, but the term "socialistic" is a misnomer.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoAnd so is your company. And your internal family dynamics. No points for noticing that different levels of organization are structured differently. The important thing about America is, there exists a level where you may move about freely and make your own choices. Which choices are usually about exactly what structure you want to join.
- krage77 15y agoThis is completely absurd and you should really calm down. Aside from 5-10 Fortune 500 CEOs, how many others can you name? You do understand that Silicon Valley's top VCs are rarely heard from, correct? There are literally thousands of companies in Silcon Valley that have more revenue than Twitter. I bet you can't name more than 50. Top bankers rarely get press. Can you name any? Or better yet, how many billionaires can you name among the thousands? We're not all Steve Jobs, nor do we want to be. Your idea of what it takes to succeed is bordering on asinine.
- rbarooah 15y agoAnd indeed Steve Jobs is pretty quiet, and often criticized for it. He also never talks about himself but only about the results of his company, and even then only a couple of times a year. Given that he's the CEO of one of the most successful companies in history, it's hard to imagine him being any more quiet and still doing his job.