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I relate to many of these points as inner thoughts, however it's important to play Devil's advocate and remember that the stars really have to align for your id

I relate to many of these points as inner thoughts, however it's important to play Devil's advocate and remember that the stars really have to align for your ideas or work to spread and gain recognition. It's not enough to make something great, you also have to communicate about it effectively and other people have to be personally interested in it, too, which is beyond your control. Your best ideas might be useful to you but seen as boring to others. And you shouldn't assume that the reason is that you are ahead of your time. The explanation is probably much simpler. I sometimes think to myself, "I've released a lot of open source code that's really simple and useful and better than any of the alternatives I could find. Why doesn't it get more traction?" In some cases, it very well might if I could get people to just look at the source code, but I struggle to write a compelling README that convinces people to even bother doing so. You have to accept that you might be strong at one part of the process but weak in another. Sure you could be a genius that excels at everything and are so far ahead that no one understands you. But no, you've probably dropped the ball somewhere. Take a step back, examine people's perceptions of your work, and work backwards to fix the roadblocks of success. Love it or hate it, marketing plays a big role here. Even something as simple as having a good logo can double the number of people that pay attention. And don't try to convince people that your algorithms are amazing. Convince them that those algorithms solve their problems.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
He compares himself to the nearly-forgotten "hero" scientists. But he really belongs to the ranks of the unknown multitude of almost-successful "forgotten" - the people who spent their lives pursuing their ideas but those ideas were never received well, or popularised. I keep seeing startups almost succeed. They got everything "right", there's nothing they did wrong, but for some reason it didn't take off. While others don't even get the basics right and yet it soars. There doesn't seem to be any reason for it. Or at least none that I can see. We don't know why something "goes viral". We can't predict that, can't control it. Just try to make the most of it if it happens to us. There's a vast pool of people all trying to do things, in every discipline. For reasons we (and they) don't understand, some of them "succeed" and are popularised. We hear about them. The rest are mostly ignored. We don't hear about them. There's nothing we can particularly identify as making an individual succeed or not. Like everything in life, the process doesn't care about individuals. It's the genetic approach - spread the population over a large area and let the successful ones survive to the next generation. The rest of them die bitterly regretting their failure in blog posts.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

He compares himself to the nearly-forgotten "hero" scientists. But he really belongs to the ranks of the unknown multitude of almost-successful "forgotten" - the people who spent their lives pursuing their ideas but those ideas were never received well, or popularised. I keep seeing startups almost succeed. They got everything "right", there's nothing they did wrong, but for some reason it didn't take off. While others don't even get the basics right and yet it soars. There doesn't seem to be any reason for it. Or at least none that I can see. We don't know why something "goes viral". We can't predict that, can't control it. Just try to make the most of it if it happens to us. There's a vast pool of people all trying to do things, in every discipline. For reasons we (and they) don't understand, some of them "succeed" and are popularised. We hear about them. The rest are mostly ignored. We don't hear about them. There's nothing we can particularly identify as making an individual succeed or not. Like everything in life, the process doesn't care about individuals. It's the genetic approach - spread the population over a large area and let the successful ones survive to the next generation. The rest of them die bitterly regretting their failure in blog posts.