7 ms·

None of Us Knows What We're Doing

164 points by srid 15y ago

FeelsGoodMan69 15y ago
What's with all the bold and italics? I feel like I'm being yelled at in the face.
swanson 15y ago
I'm surprised this didn't get much of a response on HN - I really enjoyed the article. Very inspirational and candid.
goo 15y ago
I don't usually play the part of armchair psychologist, but this essay appears to me to be an excellent example of projection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias The author assumes that because he doesn't know what he's doing, other people also don't. I disagree. Sometimes people can know exactly what they're doing, and be fairly confident about the possible consequences. I made a viral hit similar to the author's YT instant, and I very much did not know what I was doing. Then I did it again with different code, without leveraging the existing user base, just to see if it was all luck. It wasn't. I think a better argument would be that "sometimes successful projects are successful by accident", but that would make a terrible post title.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  I agree with you completely, but I do think the biggest thing holding people back is fear, either that they won't do the right thing or they will fail. As I told my kids tonight, be do-ers, not spectators.
  - Alex3917 15y ago
    "We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR; create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTPFs1diXp0#t=1m19s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTPFs1diXp0#t=1m19s
  - ericmoritz 15y ago
    Everyone has their own internal FUD generator, we just need to acknowledge our own FUD and ignore it because we all can do amazing things if we don't let it control us.
- jeromec 15y ago
  Yeah, according to the author I guess Einstein was "winging it" too.
  - BasDirks 15y ago
    Don't know why you were downvoted, it's a decent point you make. There are people who dedicated their entire life to an idea or ideal, and succeed _that_ way. Perhaps it's useful to distinguish between "entrepreneurial" success-stories and achievements like Einstein's
    - jeromec 15y ago
      Well, yeah, I might give him some slack if he limited it to entrepreneurial success, although I still wouldn't agree with it. He contends the entrepreneurs behind Club Penguin (sold to Disney) or Mint (sold to Intuit) -- or to go old-school, Berkshire Hathaway -- "winged" their way to success. But he doesn't stop there: Even Fortune 500 CEOs, Nobel Prize winners, and U.S. presidents — all are really good at winging it. Proclaiming Nobel Prize winners in fields like Chemistry or Physics are "winging it" is, frankly, uninformed and insulting.
      - Alex3917 15y ago
        "He contends the entrepreneurs behind Club Penguin (sold to Disney) or Mint (sold to Intuit)" I can't speak for Mint, but Scott Cook (who founded Intuit) was definitely winging it: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail523.html# http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail523.html#
        jeromec 15y ago
        Yes, I didn't say all entrepreneurs have a clear idea of what they want to do, how they will do it, and how it's likely to come out -- many clearly don't. However, that's not always the case. I believe Club Penguin, a site that clearly targeted a demographic of youth, and Mint which targeted personal finance, are examples of companies set up from day one with a clear idea of what they were trying to accomplish.
- vannevar 15y ago
  Then I did it again with different code, without leveraging the existing user base, just to see if it was all luck. Did you post it under a different name and account that none of your friends or contacts knew about? Just curious how you were able to be sure none of the existing user base or any of the notoriety you gained from the first hit contributed to the second.
  - goo 15y ago
    They were fairly different demographics- for the second one I did post a link to it from a small site I made that shared the demographic a tiny bit (ragecaptions.com), and that seeded it with like 100 visitors a day, but that was it. Also, I obviously told my friends about it, but I have just a modest social network. For the curious, the first site was mylifeisaverage.com, the second was mylifeisbro.com. I never connected the two in any way (other than obviously playing off of the "My Life Is..." meme that had begun, but anyone could do that. See my life is twilight, etc.) And fear not, I have no more 'mylifeis...' sites in production. I think a third one would just be sad.
hugh3 15y ago
The grammar of this headline really bugs me. The author correctly remembers that "None of us" is singular, but then spoils it by throwing in the plural "we're". The correct version would, I think, be "None of us knows what he's doing", although both the feminists and the languagelog folks would complain about that.
- Johngibb 15y ago
  How about "None of us knows what they're doing"? Hasn't it become generally accepted that 'they' can be used as a gender neutral singular pronoun?
  - dvdhsu 15y ago
    "they're" refers to a party in third person, while it should refer to "us" which is in first person.
- premchai21 15y ago
  Are you sure about “none” being singular in that context? I agree that the title is inconsistent, but I'd have written “None of us know what we're doing” (if I couldn't just pick some other phrasing). gcide defines “none” as “No one; not one; not anything; – frequently used also partitively, or as a plural, not any.” and also offers “None of their productions are extant. –Blair”, both purportedly from 1913 Webster. So it seems that the pronoun can be interpreted in either number as needed.
  - dvdhsu 15y ago
    Yep, "none" is not always singular. For example: "None of them are coming today" instead of "none of them is coming today". It is generally considered unidiomatic to use the latter.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      No, the former is wrong (and sounds very wrong to me) regardless of how frequently misused it is. "None" == "Not one", and therefore singular.
Helianthus 15y ago
Well, yeah. No one knows what they're doing. They only have the appearance by doing the sensible thing and doing the best they can. The result is that in reality a lot of people know what they're doing; but they're still resting on that cardinal assumption: whatever you're doing, it could fall to pieces. Even the most egotistical hacker, in his/her private moments, acknowledges the chaos of the universe.
aqrashik 15y ago
I agree with some of the points made, specifically that success is more about luck than anything else, but I flat out disagree on some other points. Why would anyone advocate not listening to successful entrepreneurs, or even failed ones for that. While no one may completely know what they're doing, to simply say that everyone is winging it without any sense of direction is too extreme. You can always learn from the successes or failures of others and having someone who's been there and done that to guide you can make a lot of decisions a lot simpler.
taphangum 15y ago
One of the best articles on hn this year.
nicpottier 15y ago
Is it just me or is this perhaps taking the story of YouTube Instant a bit far? I mean ya, I guess it got some press and got him a job offer, but it's not like he invented cold fusion or something. It was a cute idea. Can we really draw any kind of real conclusions from it? Seems like that type of success, of a cute meme taking off is actually rather common, it is the longer term, build a sustainable company, king of success that is much more difficult. PS. Hate the font formatting, ugh.
- tintin 15y ago
  "PS. Hate the font formatting, ugh." Guess you meant the formatting on feross.org? At first I also thought 'ugh', but as UI it is great because it is very readable.
- ctdonath 15y ago
  He's excited about how successful he can be when applying himself to an idea for a few hours. Scale it to 10,000 hours (Gladwell's Rule for success). And that to >100,000 hours (lifetime devotion to an idea by the hyper-successful). The importance of learning enough to recognize an opportunity, searching for it, finding it, then tenaciously applying oneself to it for decades, is something not taught in schools (at least not well) - most have to figure it out or fall into it.
arapidhs 15y ago
The internet is so unpredictable.
kakashi_ 15y ago
Are you still reading Hacker News? Didn't you get it?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
tintin 15y ago
One think I'm missing in this story: You have to know what you are doing to have some luck in doing what you do.
ctdonath 15y ago
"I decided to turn off the incessant trivial chatter on Twitter and TechCrunch, get my hands dirty, and just build something." Hence this exchange a few days back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556295 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556295 "He seems to leave virtually no trace (other than awesome software) on the Internet." "Probably because he spends his time writing awesome software."
- geekzgalore 15y ago
  An excellent point.
thewisedude 15y ago
Your claim that most people who hit success dont have product vision may be true. Even though this might not be quantifiable, I get a similar idea from what I read. But I definitely think that it is not as uncommon as you think among Fortune 500 companies. I would think Bill gates( controversies/ethical questions apart) had a great vision. The reason why I say this is, I could say cancel a trip to Bahamas hoping to build something and see if I make it big. However, I would probably not drop out of a prestigious school to build something unless I am dead sure it will be a success. Obviously I am talking about Bill here.
spiffytech 15y ago
I'm surprised no one's brought up the counterexample of Steve Jobs. He turned Apple from an unknown garage startup to one of the industry's most powerful players in just a few short years. When Jobs was ousted, Apple went to the dumpster. When he returned, Apple once again rose to great success. Jobs was directly responsible for enough wildly successful products to make probably any other company or inventor in history green with envy. It would be silly to claim that Apple's success is due to blind luck. Jobs' relationship with Apple and Apple's products appears causal and has been repeated in different market environments with vastly different product lines, which flatly contradicts the idea that _all_ successful people wing it and succeed based on luck. Sure, some people succeed on accident. Some people succeed because they have real talent and just happen to get publicity at the right time. But some people succeed on purpose.

164 points by srid 15y ago

FeelsGoodMan69 15y ago

What's with all the bold and italics? I feel like I'm being yelled at in the face.

swanson 15y ago

I'm surprised this didn't get much of a response on HN - I really enjoyed the article. Very inspirational and candid.

goo 15y ago

I don't usually play the part of armchair psychologist, but this essay appears to me to be an excellent example of projection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias The author assumes that because he doesn't know what he's doing, other people also don't. I disagree. Sometimes people can know exactly what they're doing, and be fairly confident about the possible consequences. I made a viral hit similar to the author's YT instant, and I very much did not know what I was doing. Then I did it again with different code, without leveraging the existing user base, just to see if it was all luck. It wasn't. I think a better argument would be that "sometimes successful projects are successful by accident", but that would make a terrible post title.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I agree with you completely, but I do think the biggest thing holding people back is fear, either that they won't do the right thing or they will fail. As I told my kids tonight, be do-ers, not spectators.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  "We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR; create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTPFs1diXp0#t=1m19s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTPFs1diXp0#t=1m19s
- ericmoritz 15y ago
  Everyone has their own internal FUD generator, we just need to acknowledge our own FUD and ignore it because we all can do amazing things if we don't let it control us.
jeromec 15y ago
Yeah, according to the author I guess Einstein was "winging it" too.
- BasDirks 15y ago
  Don't know why you were downvoted, it's a decent point you make. There are people who dedicated their entire life to an idea or ideal, and succeed _that_ way. Perhaps it's useful to distinguish between "entrepreneurial" success-stories and achievements like Einstein's
  - jeromec 15y ago
    Well, yeah, I might give him some slack if he limited it to entrepreneurial success, although I still wouldn't agree with it. He contends the entrepreneurs behind Club Penguin (sold to Disney) or Mint (sold to Intuit) -- or to go old-school, Berkshire Hathaway -- "winged" their way to success. But he doesn't stop there: Even Fortune 500 CEOs, Nobel Prize winners, and U.S. presidents — all are really good at winging it. Proclaiming Nobel Prize winners in fields like Chemistry or Physics are "winging it" is, frankly, uninformed and insulting.
    - Alex3917 15y ago
      "He contends the entrepreneurs behind Club Penguin (sold to Disney) or Mint (sold to Intuit)" I can't speak for Mint, but Scott Cook (who founded Intuit) was definitely winging it: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail523.html# http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail523.html#
      - jeromec 15y ago
        Yes, I didn't say all entrepreneurs have a clear idea of what they want to do, how they will do it, and how it's likely to come out -- many clearly don't. However, that's not always the case. I believe Club Penguin, a site that clearly targeted a demographic of youth, and Mint which targeted personal finance, are examples of companies set up from day one with a clear idea of what they were trying to accomplish.
vannevar 15y ago
Then I did it again with different code, without leveraging the existing user base, just to see if it was all luck. Did you post it under a different name and account that none of your friends or contacts knew about? Just curious how you were able to be sure none of the existing user base or any of the notoriety you gained from the first hit contributed to the second.
- goo 15y ago
  They were fairly different demographics- for the second one I did post a link to it from a small site I made that shared the demographic a tiny bit (ragecaptions.com), and that seeded it with like 100 visitors a day, but that was it. Also, I obviously told my friends about it, but I have just a modest social network. For the curious, the first site was mylifeisaverage.com, the second was mylifeisbro.com. I never connected the two in any way (other than obviously playing off of the "My Life Is..." meme that had begun, but anyone could do that. See my life is twilight, etc.) And fear not, I have no more 'mylifeis...' sites in production. I think a third one would just be sad.

hugh3 15y ago

The grammar of this headline really bugs me. The author correctly remembers that "None of us" is singular, but then spoils it by throwing in the plural "we're". The correct version would, I think, be "None of us knows what he's doing", although both the feminists and the languagelog folks would complain about that.

Johngibb 15y ago
How about "None of us knows what they're doing"? Hasn't it become generally accepted that 'they' can be used as a gender neutral singular pronoun?
- dvdhsu 15y ago
  "they're" refers to a party in third person, while it should refer to "us" which is in first person.
premchai21 15y ago
Are you sure about “none” being singular in that context? I agree that the title is inconsistent, but I'd have written “None of us know what we're doing” (if I couldn't just pick some other phrasing). gcide defines “none” as “No one; not one; not anything; – frequently used also partitively, or as a plural, not any.” and also offers “None of their productions are extant. –Blair”, both purportedly from 1913 Webster. So it seems that the pronoun can be interpreted in either number as needed.
- dvdhsu 15y ago
  Yep, "none" is not always singular. For example: "None of them are coming today" instead of "none of them is coming today". It is generally considered unidiomatic to use the latter.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    No, the former is wrong (and sounds very wrong to me) regardless of how frequently misused it is. "None" == "Not one", and therefore singular.

Helianthus 15y ago

Well, yeah. No one knows what they're doing. They only have the appearance by doing the sensible thing and doing the best they can. The result is that in reality a lot of people know what they're doing; but they're still resting on that cardinal assumption: whatever you're doing, it could fall to pieces. Even the most egotistical hacker, in his/her private moments, acknowledges the chaos of the universe.

aqrashik 15y ago

I agree with some of the points made, specifically that success is more about luck than anything else, but I flat out disagree on some other points. Why would anyone advocate not listening to successful entrepreneurs, or even failed ones for that. While no one may completely know what they're doing, to simply say that everyone is winging it without any sense of direction is too extreme. You can always learn from the successes or failures of others and having someone who's been there and done that to guide you can make a lot of decisions a lot simpler.

taphangum 15y ago

One of the best articles on hn this year.

nicpottier 15y ago

Is it just me or is this perhaps taking the story of YouTube Instant a bit far? I mean ya, I guess it got some press and got him a job offer, but it's not like he invented cold fusion or something. It was a cute idea. Can we really draw any kind of real conclusions from it? Seems like that type of success, of a cute meme taking off is actually rather common, it is the longer term, build a sustainable company, king of success that is much more difficult. PS. Hate the font formatting, ugh.

tintin 15y ago
"PS. Hate the font formatting, ugh." Guess you meant the formatting on feross.org? At first I also thought 'ugh', but as UI it is great because it is very readable.
ctdonath 15y ago
He's excited about how successful he can be when applying himself to an idea for a few hours. Scale it to 10,000 hours (Gladwell's Rule for success). And that to >100,000 hours (lifetime devotion to an idea by the hyper-successful). The importance of learning enough to recognize an opportunity, searching for it, finding it, then tenaciously applying oneself to it for decades, is something not taught in schools (at least not well) - most have to figure it out or fall into it.

arapidhs 15y ago

The internet is so unpredictable.

kakashi_ 15y ago

Are you still reading Hacker News? Didn't you get it?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

tintin 15y ago

One think I'm missing in this story: You have to know what you are doing to have some luck in doing what you do.

ctdonath 15y ago

"I decided to turn off the incessant trivial chatter on Twitter and TechCrunch, get my hands dirty, and just build something." Hence this exchange a few days back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556295 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556295 "He seems to leave virtually no trace (other than awesome software) on the Internet." "Probably because he spends his time writing awesome software."

geekzgalore 15y ago
An excellent point.

thewisedude 15y ago

Your claim that most people who hit success dont have product vision may be true. Even though this might not be quantifiable, I get a similar idea from what I read. But I definitely think that it is not as uncommon as you think among Fortune 500 companies. I would think Bill gates( controversies/ethical questions apart) had a great vision. The reason why I say this is, I could say cancel a trip to Bahamas hoping to build something and see if I make it big. However, I would probably not drop out of a prestigious school to build something unless I am dead sure it will be a success. Obviously I am talking about Bill here.

spiffytech 15y ago

I'm surprised no one's brought up the counterexample of Steve Jobs. He turned Apple from an unknown garage startup to one of the industry's most powerful players in just a few short years. When Jobs was ousted, Apple went to the dumpster. When he returned, Apple once again rose to great success. Jobs was directly responsible for enough wildly successful products to make probably any other company or inventor in history green with envy. It would be silly to claim that Apple's success is due to blind luck. Jobs' relationship with Apple and Apple's products appears causal and has been repeated in different market environments with vastly different product lines, which flatly contradicts the idea that _all_ successful people wing it and succeed based on luck. Sure, some people succeed on accident. Some people succeed because they have real talent and just happen to get publicity at the right time. But some people succeed on purpose.