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How Running A Business Changes The Way You Think

477 points by JacobAldridge 15y ago

Tichy 15y ago
Thank you for the inspiring write-up! Btw, is it intentional that the blog suggests sharing the link on Delicious? Is Delicious still a secret weapon perhaps?
- patio11 15y ago
  I'm testing out a Wordpress plugin that I'm writing for a client, and I figured I'd inflict it on my readers before I did it on their readers. (It will get OSSed, eventually, after I iron more kinks out. Someone reported it broke printing -- who knew?) I hate TwitBook sharing buttons, for a bunch of reasons. Conversely, I love the delicious button -- I slap it on (typically) geek-friendly reference content and a) it gets a lot of instantaneous loving and b) it sends relevant traffic for a long, long time. Not too much an issue for my blog but very relevant to clients: many people have Delicious -> blog setups. This means that a save on Delicious sometimes counts as a link, in a way that tweets and FB activity typically do not. You can imagine the SEO benefits of that one.
  - pkamb 15y ago
    "inflict" is a good word choice for that blue bar :)
    - Luyt 15y ago
      I dislike these boxes that slide into view when you reach the end of an article. It distracts the eye from the text, like any moving thing or animated GIF on the page. Just some static text below the article would be better, like 'Read other articles: ABC, DEF, XYZ' and perhaps some static tweet/facebook button.
      - Tichy 15y ago
        Then again most advertisements aim to be at least a little bit distracting. What would be the point of an ad that nobody sees?
  - alinajaf 15y ago
    I implemented the flydown on my little side projects blog in about an hour after reading your other comment about it, it's doing really well. Keep up the good work!
  - mikeklaas 15y ago
    This is how it appears on Safari/Mac: http://i.imgur.com/VSyQB.png http://i.imgur.com/VSyQB.png Lots of content bleeding out of the box. Also, the title of the article needs line-height: 1.2; or more (the default line-height is almost always a typographical travesty)
deleted 15y ago
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patio11 15y ago
As always, I'm happy to talk about it. I think I specifically owe jdietrich a shoutout for his comment here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2667481 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2667481 . I knew in the back of my head that I care about being happy. It was not obvious to me other people cared to read about that aspect of the business. Back to our regularly scheduled tactics/strategy discussion next time.
- michaeldhopkins 15y ago
  Thanks, I really enjoyed your essay. However, I didn't care for your subscribe overlay appearing so abruptly. Would you please slide it down from the top or use something else to ease it in on the reader?
  - Omnipresent 15y ago
    I second that as well. really annoying. but wonderful post. You can do amazing things with life if money is not on top of the list.
  - dkokelley 15y ago
    Agreed. It was abrupt, and I thought for a second I must have scrolled too far or accidentally switched tabs. If there must be one (and I'm not against them), I would suggest the NY Times style slider. It's unobtrusive and smooth, so I know where it is coming from, and doesn't get in my way if I want to act on it. (Granted their objective is to bring you to another article.)
  - hammock 15y ago
    I thought it was a col, targeted idea to make it appear only for the people who get all the way to the bottom of the article (took me a second to figure that out) . It is a little unwieldy though once it appears, covering text etc. Maybe if it comes in from the side? P.S. great post- here's some dopamine for you -----> o
- anishkothari 15y ago
  Patrick, excellent write-up on the psychology of self-employment. I've found that by manipulating the environment (e.g. your Delta experience) you can really drive the situation. Neither giving in the clerk's comment nor engaging their wrath would have led to a favorable outcome but being neutral led to a complimentary flight. Cheers!
JacobAldridge 15y ago
Well we now have a better idea of the psychology behind 58,363+ Karma. Patrick - as a business (not competent programming) guy who runs his own small business, and consults / coaches many much larger businesses, this was probably the article of yours I've had most empathy (and a thrill of excitement) reading. I mean, the HN-man-crush has been there for years, but I really received a lot of value feeling your feelings of suddenly being an international business consultant and being good at it. Even your writing style here seemed more ... feely, though that may have been me. And if that empathy gives me any credibility to support a key piece, more people should add 50% (or more - one of my mentors told me recently to 2x + $150 my price) more often. You are almost certainly more experienced and confident than you think you are. Recognising that is paying massive dividends for me.
icey 15y ago
This should be recommended reading for anyone suffering from self-doubt before making the leap into self-employment.
- j_baker 15y ago
  You're not necessarily wrong. You're just damning the article with faint praise. The point of the article wasn't "Do you want to start a business? Yes you do. Go start one now." It's more "Do you want to start a business? Yes? Go do it! No? No sweat! Just make sure you're making yourself happy and not just toiling away to make someone else happy." The ultimate theme behind this blog post is to make sure your life is about you and your relation to other people. Otherwise, you get trapped into believing a lot of shoulds: you should get a bachelor's degree, you should get married, you should work long hours for terrible salary, etc.
klbarry 15y ago
This is an excellent article, and fascinating to read. However, 5/6 of the way down the page, a blue share bar appears on top that I cannot click out of. It is quite annoying.
- wedesoft 15y ago
  If you happen to use Firefox, I can recommend the iReader extension. http://www.samabox.com/extensions/iReader/ http://www.samabox.com/extensions/iReader/
  - Luyt 15y ago
    Thanks for the tip. There is also the Readability AddOn (http://www.readability.com/addons http://www.readability.com/addons) but that somehow hides the comments at the bottom of the article. iReader does not.
aklein 15y ago
RE: Working harder is not correlated to more money But what about working smarter? Sure, such a thing is harder to measure, but it's pretty much the only gauge when you're talking about meritocracy. Working harder, not smarter, is the make-work bias.
- pg_bot 15y ago
  I think it is also unfair to compare working hard between different industries. That is like comparing apples to oranges, surely a harder working software engineer will make more money than a lazy one.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    I think that's exactly Patrick's point: There is no such casual relationship. Perhaps the harder working engineer will be better disposed to eventually earn more, but if the lazy one has better communication skills and knows how to play the politics, the balance could easily come out in his favour.
  - patio11 15y ago
    surely a harder working software engineer will make more money than a lazy one. I know two offices in NYC at an employer that I probably shouldn't name. In one, an engineer toils away for 90 hour weeks and earns about $40k per year. In the other, an engineer works fairly typical Manhattan hours (my understanding is that that would be a little south of 50), and makes $120k. The mistake made by the engineer in the first office? They were asked a fairly consequential question by a HR department three years ago, and said "Yes." instead of "No." Literally. One word. The specific question was "Are you OK with your employer of record remaining our Japanese branch office?" The right answer would have been to get their employer of record transferred to the American subsidiary, which pays Manhattan wages to Manhattan workers, rather than Nagoya wages with a 25% hardship premium. He gets a gold star for loyalty, though. That is about as close to a pathological case as I could think of, but in general, "hard work gets rewarded" is not something we repeat because it is accurate.
    - 15y ago
Omnipresent 15y ago
I've been coming to HN for months and months always dreaming of doing something on the side along with my megacorp job but I have not started on anything. If I get an Idea, I wonder about it for 2 to 3 days thinking about reasons why it won't work and forget about it. I think about at least opening my own small consulting company on the side but then think how would I get any clients. This has basically been going on for quite a lot of months. But I end up going home, sitting in bed and still contemplating things. For what its worth, I was happy before being bitten by the startup bug, I guess not knowing what things CAN be like is better than knowing what things CAN be like but not being able to do anything about it. Knowing that I need to change my attitude and finish things, reading this article made me fill and mail the registration for my LLC.
- Hisoka 15y ago
  But do you have an idea?
  - Omnipresent 15y ago
    I do not but at the very least I want to go out there and find my first consulting client.
    - wallflower 15y ago
      I worked at a small company that had a graphic designer who volunteered his skills to do promotions, posters for a few local non-profits. He really did a good job. From this work, through board members of the non-profits, he got great work (lucrative, think corporate annual reports). When I first started consulting, I did pro-bono work. If you do it well and network in your local community, you will be approached with offers for work. Think of your first few engagements as investments. And with luck and calibrated hard work, you will build your portfolio and reputation For finding pro-bono work, you must believe in their cause.
- nthj 15y ago
  I've dealt with a similar issue the last few months, mate. Introspection to the level of getting almost nothing done. I finally self-diagnosed myself with a testosterone deficiency, and immediately gave up caffeine, ate healthier and started regular exercise. The introspection is still there, but it's far, far, far less a problem, in only 3 weeks. I can't believe how much stuff I'm accomplishing. So if I can go from crippled to David Allen 2.0 in less than a month, there's hope for anyone. Be healthy, be interesting, and the dreaming should naturally turn into doing sooner rather than later. Far better than trying to force it. I may or may not had an issue with this. The point is my psyche believed I did, giving me specific ways to “fix it.” Mental game here.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
Fascinating story and great insights. I think you undervalue your introspection. It raises an interesting question though, if you were in a class that graded on a curve, did you do just enough to get an A or did you always get enough to insure it would be an A minimum? Then the harder aspect of that, did your getting an A ever result in someone else getting a B grade? If it did would that make getting the A 'better'? The question relates to the 'game' aspect of success. At Google, for example, when I was there it had a lot of money and not a lot of real[1] projects. So a number of people used gamification as a means of defining success. Specifically they would seek out 'win' such as having their project grow at the expense of others, or create the maximum amount of change in the shortest amount of time, or any number of ways to create a scoring system and then to 'win' based on that scoring system. The insight you had, and I came to later, was that if you're button is 'win' and you take away the obvious 'company gets "better"' scoring system, people invent their own.I concluded that one of the jobs of 'management' in that scenario, is to help define a scoring system that allows folks who are 'wired to win' be successful and not be destructive to those around them. [1] 'real' in the sense that few projects would make money for the company or cause it to lose money, they existed primarily as science projects to keep the engineers busy.
- patio11 15y ago
  I treat both school and business as PVE, not PVP. (Gamer to human translation: the environment is the adversary to win over, not the other players.) There's a reason my dashboards always show my historical sales stats, not my competitor's sales stats. Beating my old score is a win. Beating their scores is not. An environment where many people were aiming to cause losses would be very unattractive to me, even if it could offer me all the tea in China.
  - taphangum 15y ago
    You should write a book on this mindset. Hell, i'd pre-order a copy now!
  - Luyt 15y ago
    Beating my old score is a win. Beating their scores is not Ayn Rand wrote: "A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
astrofinch 15y ago
Does the median investment banker really make that much? I was under the impression that the mean investment banker income was high, but there was a large amount of skew due to high salaries of the folks at the top. I was also under the impression that the job involved a soul-crushingly large workload...
astrofinch 15y ago
In three words: "Be high status".
justinph 15y ago
I take great umbrage with his graph depicting teachers both as relatively high paid and not working that hard. He says he's been a teacher, but given the plot on the graph, I highly doubt it. It's way harder than you think, and unless you're a tenured professor at a university, teachers make shit.
- mileszs 15y ago
  At the risk of incurring much wrath, I have known a teacher (a friend) who did not work very hard 9 months out of the year, and then didn't work at all the other three months. I also have a friend, a teacher, who spends significant time not merely grading papers, but improving her curricula, knowledge, and teaching skills. She does so 9 months out of the year. I am not trying to belittle the work that teachers do, but there is a significant amount of time that many teachers are not working. I would assume that is a significant reason for the dot's location on the graph.
  - brianb722 15y ago
    The problem is the $$$ plot point. Grade school teachers (in the US) are not well paid. Which is why it attracts the lazy people instead of the ones who would actually put out the effort needed to properly educate our youth. (Not meant to be an indictment of all teachers, just the "bad ones".)
- deleted 15y ago
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- jseliger 15y ago
  I've never taught high school, but I'm a grad student and teach freshmen, so I have some experience. A few observations: 1) The first time you teach a class, it's incredibly hard and time consuming, but the difficulty drops like a logarithm to a relatively low plateau after you've done it a few times. 2) At one point I thought about teaching high school English. Seattle Public Schools paid $36K / yr with a Masters or $30K / yr without starting, and those numbers topped at around $70K and $55K after 30 years (IIRC, Bellevue Public School teachers made something like ~10K more). That doesn't count retirement; teaching is unusual because a lot of the benefits are backloaded in the form of retirement pay. One woman in my grad program taught English for 26 years in Michigan and took an early retirement offer; I think she gets 70% of her last year's salary for life. Granted, those deals are going away because of the budget crisis, but a lot of the retirement stuff is still baked in. 3) You can multiply those numbers by 1.2 or so because teachers only have mandatory work for nine months of the year. 4) After two to three years, you effectively can't be fired because of union rules (unless you sleep with a student and get caught in a flagrant manner, don't show up, etc.). See this post: http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get/ http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get/ for lots of citations on that, as well as a lot of the information that's going into this comment. This has value. PG figured this out: "Economic statistics are misleading because they ignore the value of safe jobs. An easy job from which one can't be fired is worth money; exchanging the two is one of the commonest forms of corruption. A sinecure is, in effect, an annuity." http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html . Note: there are major downsides to teaching. You have to like working with relatively undeveloped people (if you're teaching high school) or children (if you're teaching elementary school). In teaching, it's very hard to make substantially more money if you really want to; whether you're a good or bad teacher isn't likely to make you more money. My big impression is that teaching isn't going to make you rich, but you're also unlikely to ever be poor. To say that "teachers make shit" isn't really true. It is to true to say that teachers have back-loaded compensation packages that tend to be high in benefits (e.g. good health care, retirement) and low in upfront salary. My smaller impression is that most teachers I had didn't seem to work that hard after their first three - four years of teaching.
mashmac2 15y ago
A (humorous but) very engaging similar story: http://lifelessboring.com/less-boring-life-start-time/ http://lifelessboring.com/less-boring-life-start-time/ Less facts, more stories, but another perspective on the 'be high status' concept.
GotToStartup 15y ago
"I have since found that many, many people I respect likewise worry they’re faking it. Anybody in my audience got the same issue?" It’s funny, when I started out in the professional programming world I had a ton of confidence. I felt unstoppable. Back then, I didn’t know shit about programming but hey, how hard could it be. Then I started learning and slowly my confidence starting dwindling away. The more I learned, the less confident I became. I was humbled by the smart people I learned from. I realized how little I actually know. Now I’m noticing how big of an issue confidence has has become. "I have found that actually showing confidence issues, on the other hand, does not do great things for one’s business" I’ve found that showing lack of confidence hurts in most areas of life. The less confidence I speak with, the less people take me seriously though. It’s ridiculous. Now, whenever I speak with certainty & confidence, it feels like I'm faking it. It’s a huge internal struggle and it’s interesting to hear others perspectives on this.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  So I think the reason that people have a wide variety of interaction styles is that they all have their own niche where they can be useful as tools, and also contribute to the greater good. E.g. society would probably fall apart if no one was willing to be an asshole at least some of the time, even though people who are often assholes tend not to benefit personally from their behavior. (Perhaps this is proof that altruism exists.) That said, I think you need to figure out what changes you want to make in society, and then be cognizant of how your style of communicating works together with what people are doing in order to choose situationally optimal strategies.
- rdoherty 15y ago
  I have the exact same problem. IMO what happens is you start to learn all the ways things can go wrong, edge cases, bugs, etc and you realize how fragile your code (and other's is). Throw on poor time estimates and you learn how difficult it is to produce quality, reliable software on time. The way I think about it is if you do question your abilities and know you're fallible, you're ahead of 90% of the other programmers out there. Because you are thinking about all the edge cases, performance, reliability, maintainability, etc, you are going to create much higher quality code than someone who is 100% confident in their abilities. Also, if you've seen quality code and worked with people smarter than you, you'll no doubt improve (as long as you're humble enough to learn from them :) )
kenjackson 15y ago
Good article, but have serious reservations as to if he knows the full extent of being a paperboy. That's a surprisingly hard job.
ignifero 15y ago
Many things one can relate to in there. For example, I just realized I also like praise for vanity/insecurity reasons. That's also the reason to write this comment. Confidence? You need to become a little macho to survive in business, but it's also addictive. Overconfidence is a double edged sword, it's good to keep the humility to yourself. Whether having your own job/business can change you? I believe not, it just allows you to be 100% yourself, disinhibited, not trying to cover up the sharp edges of your character that you usually cannot display when you are a gear in a corporate machine. For me it was also sort of like going back to childhood. And it's a lot of fun (but i think that's the endorphines from the sense of power you get). Historically, excluding feudal and industrial/postindustrial europe people were a lot more entrepreneurial, they would either be farmers, cobblers, smiths; in general people were in charge of their art. Maybe they were also happier back then.
kyro 15y ago
This was great, Patrick. I've been going through a hugely eye-opening period of my life where I'm learning lessons that your article echoes. The largest of those lessons are: A) Your main obligation is to serve yourself and to allow yourself to make decisions you are truly happy with, and B) Much more than "It's not about what you know, but who you know", I'm finding that it's really about "what you know about how to deal with people you don't know." And for me, not knowing about the latter prevented me from realizing the former, and your story about missing the Delta flight not only validated those points to me, but really hit home. Additionally, I'm finding that the way I viewed my dealings in life and overall progression as a person was completely backwards: I would look at my past attempts, from social to professional, as a long string of failures that would only continue to stretch onward, both discouraging me and crushing my confidence. But in looking at my attempts as isolated, bunkered events, the spread of potential damage is significantly decreased, which has done quite a bit to boost my confidence in that I'm more willing to take that much more of a risk. If the bomb blows up, leave the bunker and move on to the next one with your newly acquired knowledge and experience. And no one really remembers that bomb exploding as the explosion was merely a psychological dramatization. I know you somewhat touched this point in a more business-negotiating context, but it's one that's had a universal effect on how I deal with others in any context. Anyway, really nice writeup; I enjoyed it quite a bit! More articles like this one would definitely be appreciated.
- prpon 15y ago
  It is human nature to over estimate the impact of events or things we do. Every one looks at the world with their own view point. They are the center of their own universe. That's all the world we know. May be not failing often is the reason why we take ourselves so seriously. Your current view point of looking at things as isolated events is a great way of looking at life.
vaksel 15y ago
the confidence to charge more is very important. if you know what you are providing is quality, you can charge for it and people will pay for it. Sure you'll get a bit more rejection...but those cheapskates wouldn't have appreciated your work anyways. and hey if they say no, you can always go back a few weeks/months later, and tell them that you are running a discount
Create 15y ago
These are old basic ideas[1] on pursuing happiness, in a slightly rehashed way, with the ask culture (how does that work in Japan?) thrown in with some randian self determinism. [1] Schopenhauer http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10741 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10741
matthiasb 15y ago
"Money is also the convenient method of keeping score for optimizing businesses, which feels like a game to me. I really enjoy winning games with complicated rules sets, especially by optimizing the heck out of play, because optimization is often as much fun as actually playing the game." It reminds me a very inspiring talk by Seth Priebatsch called "A game layer on top of the world". I was at SXSW 2011, you can listen to it here: http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP000325 http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP000325
waterside81 15y ago
Fantastic read. People in general, but it seems developers particularly, greatly underestimate their worth and talents. A friend of mine was looking for work as a freelancer and asked me to what he should ask for by way of a rate. I asked him how much he'd be happy with, he replied "60". I said, "so ask for 100 and negotiate down if you must". He was blown away that someone would pay that much.
staunch 15y ago
I'm worried you've fallen out of one trap (salarymanhood) into another (highly paid consulting). I'm sure you're good at consulting and it's clear from the way you write that you're excited to finally get paid what you're worth for a change. I'd just hate to see you wake up in a few years in a very similar situation as you were in as a salaryman. It sounds like you're significantly increasing your cost of living: new apartment, getting married, treating money differently ("whats $2k when my comfort is on the line"), etc. If you're not careful you're going to need to consult full time just to get by. Good bye startup. No time for that. Your new wife quit her job six months ago and that new car isn't going to pay for itself. My advice: put off the enjoyment of making real money and get back to investing time in AppointmentReminder or something else that will pay big scalable dividends. That's what I'd say if we were having coffee :-)
- abalashov 15y ago
  I fell into that trap while still on salary, and it still haunts me three years into full-time consulting, and severely sabotaging attempts to transition to being a product company. Don't make the same mistake. +1
- Supermighty 15y ago
  I think his point was that the time he could have spent saving $2k would be better spent earning $5k. I didn't read this as him choosing comfort over cost, rather he realized the true value of his time.
deleted 15y ago
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Luyt 15y ago
There is a strange layout error on Patrick's site. When I reach the end of the article, suddenly some kind of overlay pops up, and makes the text unreadable. See http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/kalzumeus.png http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/kalzumeus.png for a screenshot.
- po 15y ago
  A better question is why is it in comic sans for you? Do you have a user-defined masochistic stylesheet or something?
  - Luyt 15y ago
    Oh, do not let the font distract you. Comic Sans is my all-time favourite; I use it as a default/standard font on all my machines (Windows, OSX, FreeBSD+KDE, Ubuntu etc...) You know what they say: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I just find Comic Sans a nice font to read and to program in. It's exquisite rounded shapes are nice on my eyes.
    - po 15y ago
      O_o Do not let the font distract you Not so easy. You're just trolling me now right? I guess… I mean… agh. OK. Sure… I've never thought it a particularly ugly font, I just always thought it was overused and often used in the wrong contexts. I can't imagine programming in it.
      - Luyt 15y ago
        No, I'm not trolling. I agree with you that Comic Sans is often used in wrong contexts (although the situation is becoming better). It's not wrong for programming either, in my opinion, see http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/comic-sans-python.jpg http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/comic-sans-python.jp... for an example. I dislike monospaced fonts for programming, and with that I'm in the minority. For games Comic Sans is also great, see http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/wow-Luyt-of-Khadgar-PVP-healing-champ.jpg http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/wow-Luyt-of-Khadgar-...
gwern 15y ago
> My friends also tell me that I’m almost a different man these days than even two years ago. The most striking quote to me, from my best friend: “You look… healthy.” Apparently the old day job was beating me down so thoroughly that I looked about as bad as I felt, and even on those days when I wasn’t dog tired I walked with a bit of a stoop. These days, I even stand straighter. I think that is almost too convenient to be true, but hey, it’s a story. Could be testosterone; it's extremely sensitive to status changes, see the review "The Role of Testosterone in Social Interaction" (abstract: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661311000787 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661311... ; PDF: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/piis1364661311000787.pdf http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/piis1364661311000787.pdf )
mcmc 15y ago
Your skills don't just scale down to asking out a date or going to city hall. They can scale up to $ billion mergers Maybe the world would be a better place if you had influence over that kind of semi-arbitrary wealth transfer as opposed to whoever has it now.

477 points by JacobAldridge 15y ago

Tichy 15y ago

Thank you for the inspiring write-up! Btw, is it intentional that the blog suggests sharing the link on Delicious? Is Delicious still a secret weapon perhaps?

patio11 15y ago
I'm testing out a Wordpress plugin that I'm writing for a client, and I figured I'd inflict it on my readers before I did it on their readers. (It will get OSSed, eventually, after I iron more kinks out. Someone reported it broke printing -- who knew?) I hate TwitBook sharing buttons, for a bunch of reasons. Conversely, I love the delicious button -- I slap it on (typically) geek-friendly reference content and a) it gets a lot of instantaneous loving and b) it sends relevant traffic for a long, long time. Not too much an issue for my blog but very relevant to clients: many people have Delicious -> blog setups. This means that a save on Delicious sometimes counts as a link, in a way that tweets and FB activity typically do not. You can imagine the SEO benefits of that one.
- pkamb 15y ago
  "inflict" is a good word choice for that blue bar :)
  - Luyt 15y ago
    I dislike these boxes that slide into view when you reach the end of an article. It distracts the eye from the text, like any moving thing or animated GIF on the page. Just some static text below the article would be better, like 'Read other articles: ABC, DEF, XYZ' and perhaps some static tweet/facebook button.
    - Tichy 15y ago
      Then again most advertisements aim to be at least a little bit distracting. What would be the point of an ad that nobody sees?
- alinajaf 15y ago
  I implemented the flydown on my little side projects blog in about an hour after reading your other comment about it, it's doing really well. Keep up the good work!
- mikeklaas 15y ago
  This is how it appears on Safari/Mac: http://i.imgur.com/VSyQB.png http://i.imgur.com/VSyQB.png Lots of content bleeding out of the box. Also, the title of the article needs line-height: 1.2; or more (the default line-height is almost always a typographical travesty)

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

patio11 15y ago

As always, I'm happy to talk about it. I think I specifically owe jdietrich a shoutout for his comment here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2667481 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2667481 . I knew in the back of my head that I care about being happy. It was not obvious to me other people cared to read about that aspect of the business. Back to our regularly scheduled tactics/strategy discussion next time.

michaeldhopkins 15y ago
Thanks, I really enjoyed your essay. However, I didn't care for your subscribe overlay appearing so abruptly. Would you please slide it down from the top or use something else to ease it in on the reader?
- Omnipresent 15y ago
  I second that as well. really annoying. but wonderful post. You can do amazing things with life if money is not on top of the list.
- dkokelley 15y ago
  Agreed. It was abrupt, and I thought for a second I must have scrolled too far or accidentally switched tabs. If there must be one (and I'm not against them), I would suggest the NY Times style slider. It's unobtrusive and smooth, so I know where it is coming from, and doesn't get in my way if I want to act on it. (Granted their objective is to bring you to another article.)
- hammock 15y ago
  I thought it was a col, targeted idea to make it appear only for the people who get all the way to the bottom of the article (took me a second to figure that out) . It is a little unwieldy though once it appears, covering text etc. Maybe if it comes in from the side? P.S. great post- here's some dopamine for you -----> o
anishkothari 15y ago
Patrick, excellent write-up on the psychology of self-employment. I've found that by manipulating the environment (e.g. your Delta experience) you can really drive the situation. Neither giving in the clerk's comment nor engaging their wrath would have led to a favorable outcome but being neutral led to a complimentary flight. Cheers!

JacobAldridge 15y ago

Well we now have a better idea of the psychology behind 58,363+ Karma. Patrick - as a business (not competent programming) guy who runs his own small business, and consults / coaches many much larger businesses, this was probably the article of yours I've had most empathy (and a thrill of excitement) reading. I mean, the HN-man-crush has been there for years, but I really received a lot of value feeling your feelings of suddenly being an international business consultant and being good at it. Even your writing style here seemed more ... feely, though that may have been me. And if that empathy gives me any credibility to support a key piece, more people should add 50% (or more - one of my mentors told me recently to 2x + $150 my price) more often. You are almost certainly more experienced and confident than you think you are. Recognising that is paying massive dividends for me.

icey 15y ago

This should be recommended reading for anyone suffering from self-doubt before making the leap into self-employment.

j_baker 15y ago
You're not necessarily wrong. You're just damning the article with faint praise. The point of the article wasn't "Do you want to start a business? Yes you do. Go start one now." It's more "Do you want to start a business? Yes? Go do it! No? No sweat! Just make sure you're making yourself happy and not just toiling away to make someone else happy." The ultimate theme behind this blog post is to make sure your life is about you and your relation to other people. Otherwise, you get trapped into believing a lot of shoulds: you should get a bachelor's degree, you should get married, you should work long hours for terrible salary, etc.

klbarry 15y ago

This is an excellent article, and fascinating to read. However, 5/6 of the way down the page, a blue share bar appears on top that I cannot click out of. It is quite annoying.

wedesoft 15y ago
If you happen to use Firefox, I can recommend the iReader extension. http://www.samabox.com/extensions/iReader/ http://www.samabox.com/extensions/iReader/
- Luyt 15y ago
  Thanks for the tip. There is also the Readability AddOn (http://www.readability.com/addons http://www.readability.com/addons) but that somehow hides the comments at the bottom of the article. iReader does not.

aklein 15y ago

RE: Working harder is not correlated to more money But what about working smarter? Sure, such a thing is harder to measure, but it's pretty much the only gauge when you're talking about meritocracy. Working harder, not smarter, is the make-work bias.

pg_bot 15y ago
I think it is also unfair to compare working hard between different industries. That is like comparing apples to oranges, surely a harder working software engineer will make more money than a lazy one.
- mseebach 15y ago
  I think that's exactly Patrick's point: There is no such casual relationship. Perhaps the harder working engineer will be better disposed to eventually earn more, but if the lazy one has better communication skills and knows how to play the politics, the balance could easily come out in his favour.
- patio11 15y ago
  surely a harder working software engineer will make more money than a lazy one. I know two offices in NYC at an employer that I probably shouldn't name. In one, an engineer toils away for 90 hour weeks and earns about $40k per year. In the other, an engineer works fairly typical Manhattan hours (my understanding is that that would be a little south of 50), and makes $120k. The mistake made by the engineer in the first office? They were asked a fairly consequential question by a HR department three years ago, and said "Yes." instead of "No." Literally. One word. The specific question was "Are you OK with your employer of record remaining our Japanese branch office?" The right answer would have been to get their employer of record transferred to the American subsidiary, which pays Manhattan wages to Manhattan workers, rather than Nagoya wages with a 25% hardship premium. He gets a gold star for loyalty, though. That is about as close to a pathological case as I could think of, but in general, "hard work gets rewarded" is not something we repeat because it is accurate.
  - 15y ago

Omnipresent 15y ago

I've been coming to HN for months and months always dreaming of doing something on the side along with my megacorp job but I have not started on anything. If I get an Idea, I wonder about it for 2 to 3 days thinking about reasons why it won't work and forget about it. I think about at least opening my own small consulting company on the side but then think how would I get any clients. This has basically been going on for quite a lot of months. But I end up going home, sitting in bed and still contemplating things. For what its worth, I was happy before being bitten by the startup bug, I guess not knowing what things CAN be like is better than knowing what things CAN be like but not being able to do anything about it. Knowing that I need to change my attitude and finish things, reading this article made me fill and mail the registration for my LLC.

Hisoka 15y ago
But do you have an idea?
- Omnipresent 15y ago
  I do not but at the very least I want to go out there and find my first consulting client.
  - wallflower 15y ago
    I worked at a small company that had a graphic designer who volunteered his skills to do promotions, posters for a few local non-profits. He really did a good job. From this work, through board members of the non-profits, he got great work (lucrative, think corporate annual reports). When I first started consulting, I did pro-bono work. If you do it well and network in your local community, you will be approached with offers for work. Think of your first few engagements as investments. And with luck and calibrated hard work, you will build your portfolio and reputation For finding pro-bono work, you must believe in their cause.
nthj 15y ago
I've dealt with a similar issue the last few months, mate. Introspection to the level of getting almost nothing done. I finally self-diagnosed myself with a testosterone deficiency, and immediately gave up caffeine, ate healthier and started regular exercise. The introspection is still there, but it's far, far, far less a problem, in only 3 weeks. I can't believe how much stuff I'm accomplishing. So if I can go from crippled to David Allen 2.0 in less than a month, there's hope for anyone. Be healthy, be interesting, and the dreaming should naturally turn into doing sooner rather than later. Far better than trying to force it. I may or may not had an issue with this. The point is my psyche believed I did, giving me specific ways to “fix it.” Mental game here.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

Fascinating story and great insights. I think you undervalue your introspection. It raises an interesting question though, if you were in a class that graded on a curve, did you do just enough to get an A or did you always get enough to insure it would be an A minimum? Then the harder aspect of that, did your getting an A ever result in someone else getting a B grade? If it did would that make getting the A 'better'? The question relates to the 'game' aspect of success. At Google, for example, when I was there it had a lot of money and not a lot of real[1] projects. So a number of people used gamification as a means of defining success. Specifically they would seek out 'win' such as having their project grow at the expense of others, or create the maximum amount of change in the shortest amount of time, or any number of ways to create a scoring system and then to 'win' based on that scoring system. The insight you had, and I came to later, was that if you're button is 'win' and you take away the obvious 'company gets "better"' scoring system, people invent their own.I concluded that one of the jobs of 'management' in that scenario, is to help define a scoring system that allows folks who are 'wired to win' be successful and not be destructive to those around them. [1] 'real' in the sense that few projects would make money for the company or cause it to lose money, they existed primarily as science projects to keep the engineers busy.

patio11 15y ago
I treat both school and business as PVE, not PVP. (Gamer to human translation: the environment is the adversary to win over, not the other players.) There's a reason my dashboards always show my historical sales stats, not my competitor's sales stats. Beating my old score is a win. Beating their scores is not. An environment where many people were aiming to cause losses would be very unattractive to me, even if it could offer me all the tea in China.
- taphangum 15y ago
  You should write a book on this mindset. Hell, i'd pre-order a copy now!
- Luyt 15y ago
  Beating my old score is a win. Beating their scores is not Ayn Rand wrote: "A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."

astrofinch 15y ago

Does the median investment banker really make that much? I was under the impression that the mean investment banker income was high, but there was a large amount of skew due to high salaries of the folks at the top. I was also under the impression that the job involved a soul-crushingly large workload...

astrofinch 15y ago

In three words: "Be high status".

justinph 15y ago

I take great umbrage with his graph depicting teachers both as relatively high paid and not working that hard. He says he's been a teacher, but given the plot on the graph, I highly doubt it. It's way harder than you think, and unless you're a tenured professor at a university, teachers make shit.

mileszs 15y ago
At the risk of incurring much wrath, I have known a teacher (a friend) who did not work very hard 9 months out of the year, and then didn't work at all the other three months. I also have a friend, a teacher, who spends significant time not merely grading papers, but improving her curricula, knowledge, and teaching skills. She does so 9 months out of the year. I am not trying to belittle the work that teachers do, but there is a significant amount of time that many teachers are not working. I would assume that is a significant reason for the dot's location on the graph.
- brianb722 15y ago
  The problem is the $$$ plot point. Grade school teachers (in the US) are not well paid. Which is why it attracts the lazy people instead of the ones who would actually put out the effort needed to properly educate our youth. (Not meant to be an indictment of all teachers, just the "bad ones".)
deleted 15y ago
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jseliger 15y ago
I've never taught high school, but I'm a grad student and teach freshmen, so I have some experience. A few observations: 1) The first time you teach a class, it's incredibly hard and time consuming, but the difficulty drops like a logarithm to a relatively low plateau after you've done it a few times. 2) At one point I thought about teaching high school English. Seattle Public Schools paid $36K / yr with a Masters or $30K / yr without starting, and those numbers topped at around $70K and $55K after 30 years (IIRC, Bellevue Public School teachers made something like ~10K more). That doesn't count retirement; teaching is unusual because a lot of the benefits are backloaded in the form of retirement pay. One woman in my grad program taught English for 26 years in Michigan and took an early retirement offer; I think she gets 70% of her last year's salary for life. Granted, those deals are going away because of the budget crisis, but a lot of the retirement stuff is still baked in. 3) You can multiply those numbers by 1.2 or so because teachers only have mandatory work for nine months of the year. 4) After two to three years, you effectively can't be fired because of union rules (unless you sleep with a student and get caught in a flagrant manner, don't show up, etc.). See this post: http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get/ http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get/ for lots of citations on that, as well as a lot of the information that's going into this comment. This has value. PG figured this out: "Economic statistics are misleading because they ignore the value of safe jobs. An easy job from which one can't be fired is worth money; exchanging the two is one of the commonest forms of corruption. A sinecure is, in effect, an annuity." http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html . Note: there are major downsides to teaching. You have to like working with relatively undeveloped people (if you're teaching high school) or children (if you're teaching elementary school). In teaching, it's very hard to make substantially more money if you really want to; whether you're a good or bad teacher isn't likely to make you more money. My big impression is that teaching isn't going to make you rich, but you're also unlikely to ever be poor. To say that "teachers make shit" isn't really true. It is to true to say that teachers have back-loaded compensation packages that tend to be high in benefits (e.g. good health care, retirement) and low in upfront salary. My smaller impression is that most teachers I had didn't seem to work that hard after their first three - four years of teaching.

mashmac2 15y ago

A (humorous but) very engaging similar story: http://lifelessboring.com/less-boring-life-start-time/ http://lifelessboring.com/less-boring-life-start-time/ Less facts, more stories, but another perspective on the 'be high status' concept.

GotToStartup 15y ago

"I have since found that many, many people I respect likewise worry they’re faking it. Anybody in my audience got the same issue?" It’s funny, when I started out in the professional programming world I had a ton of confidence. I felt unstoppable. Back then, I didn’t know shit about programming but hey, how hard could it be. Then I started learning and slowly my confidence starting dwindling away. The more I learned, the less confident I became. I was humbled by the smart people I learned from. I realized how little I actually know. Now I’m noticing how big of an issue confidence has has become. "I have found that actually showing confidence issues, on the other hand, does not do great things for one’s business" I’ve found that showing lack of confidence hurts in most areas of life. The less confidence I speak with, the less people take me seriously though. It’s ridiculous. Now, whenever I speak with certainty & confidence, it feels like I'm faking it. It’s a huge internal struggle and it’s interesting to hear others perspectives on this.

Alex3917 15y ago
So I think the reason that people have a wide variety of interaction styles is that they all have their own niche where they can be useful as tools, and also contribute to the greater good. E.g. society would probably fall apart if no one was willing to be an asshole at least some of the time, even though people who are often assholes tend not to benefit personally from their behavior. (Perhaps this is proof that altruism exists.) That said, I think you need to figure out what changes you want to make in society, and then be cognizant of how your style of communicating works together with what people are doing in order to choose situationally optimal strategies.
rdoherty 15y ago
I have the exact same problem. IMO what happens is you start to learn all the ways things can go wrong, edge cases, bugs, etc and you realize how fragile your code (and other's is). Throw on poor time estimates and you learn how difficult it is to produce quality, reliable software on time. The way I think about it is if you do question your abilities and know you're fallible, you're ahead of 90% of the other programmers out there. Because you are thinking about all the edge cases, performance, reliability, maintainability, etc, you are going to create much higher quality code than someone who is 100% confident in their abilities. Also, if you've seen quality code and worked with people smarter than you, you'll no doubt improve (as long as you're humble enough to learn from them :) )

kenjackson 15y ago

Good article, but have serious reservations as to if he knows the full extent of being a paperboy. That's a surprisingly hard job.

ignifero 15y ago

Many things one can relate to in there. For example, I just realized I also like praise for vanity/insecurity reasons. That's also the reason to write this comment. Confidence? You need to become a little macho to survive in business, but it's also addictive. Overconfidence is a double edged sword, it's good to keep the humility to yourself. Whether having your own job/business can change you? I believe not, it just allows you to be 100% yourself, disinhibited, not trying to cover up the sharp edges of your character that you usually cannot display when you are a gear in a corporate machine. For me it was also sort of like going back to childhood. And it's a lot of fun (but i think that's the endorphines from the sense of power you get). Historically, excluding feudal and industrial/postindustrial europe people were a lot more entrepreneurial, they would either be farmers, cobblers, smiths; in general people were in charge of their art. Maybe they were also happier back then.

kyro 15y ago

This was great, Patrick. I've been going through a hugely eye-opening period of my life where I'm learning lessons that your article echoes. The largest of those lessons are: A) Your main obligation is to serve yourself and to allow yourself to make decisions you are truly happy with, and B) Much more than "It's not about what you know, but who you know", I'm finding that it's really about "what you know about how to deal with people you don't know." And for me, not knowing about the latter prevented me from realizing the former, and your story about missing the Delta flight not only validated those points to me, but really hit home. Additionally, I'm finding that the way I viewed my dealings in life and overall progression as a person was completely backwards: I would look at my past attempts, from social to professional, as a long string of failures that would only continue to stretch onward, both discouraging me and crushing my confidence. But in looking at my attempts as isolated, bunkered events, the spread of potential damage is significantly decreased, which has done quite a bit to boost my confidence in that I'm more willing to take that much more of a risk. If the bomb blows up, leave the bunker and move on to the next one with your newly acquired knowledge and experience. And no one really remembers that bomb exploding as the explosion was merely a psychological dramatization. I know you somewhat touched this point in a more business-negotiating context, but it's one that's had a universal effect on how I deal with others in any context. Anyway, really nice writeup; I enjoyed it quite a bit! More articles like this one would definitely be appreciated.

prpon 15y ago
It is human nature to over estimate the impact of events or things we do. Every one looks at the world with their own view point. They are the center of their own universe. That's all the world we know. May be not failing often is the reason why we take ourselves so seriously. Your current view point of looking at things as isolated events is a great way of looking at life.

vaksel 15y ago

the confidence to charge more is very important. if you know what you are providing is quality, you can charge for it and people will pay for it. Sure you'll get a bit more rejection...but those cheapskates wouldn't have appreciated your work anyways. and hey if they say no, you can always go back a few weeks/months later, and tell them that you are running a discount

Create 15y ago

These are old basic ideas[1] on pursuing happiness, in a slightly rehashed way, with the ask culture (how does that work in Japan?) thrown in with some randian self determinism. [1] Schopenhauer http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10741 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10741

matthiasb 15y ago

"Money is also the convenient method of keeping score for optimizing businesses, which feels like a game to me. I really enjoy winning games with complicated rules sets, especially by optimizing the heck out of play, because optimization is often as much fun as actually playing the game." It reminds me a very inspiring talk by Seth Priebatsch called "A game layer on top of the world". I was at SXSW 2011, you can listen to it here: http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP000325 http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP000325

waterside81 15y ago

Fantastic read. People in general, but it seems developers particularly, greatly underestimate their worth and talents. A friend of mine was looking for work as a freelancer and asked me to what he should ask for by way of a rate. I asked him how much he'd be happy with, he replied "60". I said, "so ask for 100 and negotiate down if you must". He was blown away that someone would pay that much.

staunch 15y ago

I'm worried you've fallen out of one trap (salarymanhood) into another (highly paid consulting). I'm sure you're good at consulting and it's clear from the way you write that you're excited to finally get paid what you're worth for a change. I'd just hate to see you wake up in a few years in a very similar situation as you were in as a salaryman. It sounds like you're significantly increasing your cost of living: new apartment, getting married, treating money differently ("whats $2k when my comfort is on the line"), etc. If you're not careful you're going to need to consult full time just to get by. Good bye startup. No time for that. Your new wife quit her job six months ago and that new car isn't going to pay for itself. My advice: put off the enjoyment of making real money and get back to investing time in AppointmentReminder or something else that will pay big scalable dividends. That's what I'd say if we were having coffee :-)

abalashov 15y ago
I fell into that trap while still on salary, and it still haunts me three years into full-time consulting, and severely sabotaging attempts to transition to being a product company. Don't make the same mistake. +1
Supermighty 15y ago
I think his point was that the time he could have spent saving $2k would be better spent earning $5k. I didn't read this as him choosing comfort over cost, rather he realized the true value of his time.

deleted 15y ago

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Luyt 15y ago

There is a strange layout error on Patrick's site. When I reach the end of the article, suddenly some kind of overlay pops up, and makes the text unreadable. See http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/kalzumeus.png http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/kalzumeus.png for a screenshot.

po 15y ago
A better question is why is it in comic sans for you? Do you have a user-defined masochistic stylesheet or something?
- Luyt 15y ago
  Oh, do not let the font distract you. Comic Sans is my all-time favourite; I use it as a default/standard font on all my machines (Windows, OSX, FreeBSD+KDE, Ubuntu etc...) You know what they say: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I just find Comic Sans a nice font to read and to program in. It's exquisite rounded shapes are nice on my eyes.
  - po 15y ago
    O_o Do not let the font distract you Not so easy. You're just trolling me now right? I guess… I mean… agh. OK. Sure… I've never thought it a particularly ugly font, I just always thought it was overused and often used in the wrong contexts. I can't imagine programming in it.
    - Luyt 15y ago
      No, I'm not trolling. I agree with you that Comic Sans is often used in wrong contexts (although the situation is becoming better). It's not wrong for programming either, in my opinion, see http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/comic-sans-python.jpg http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/comic-sans-python.jp... for an example. I dislike monospaced fonts for programming, and with that I'm in the minority. For games Comic Sans is also great, see http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/wow-Luyt-of-Khadgar-PVP-healing-champ.jpg http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/wow-Luyt-of-Khadgar-...

gwern 15y ago

> My friends also tell me that I’m almost a different man these days than even two years ago. The most striking quote to me, from my best friend: “You look… healthy.” Apparently the old day job was beating me down so thoroughly that I looked about as bad as I felt, and even on those days when I wasn’t dog tired I walked with a bit of a stoop. These days, I even stand straighter. I think that is almost too convenient to be true, but hey, it’s a story. Could be testosterone; it's extremely sensitive to status changes, see the review "The Role of Testosterone in Social Interaction" (abstract: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661311000787 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661311... ; PDF: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/piis1364661311000787.pdf http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/piis1364661311000787.pdf )

mcmc 15y ago

Your skills don't just scale down to asking out a date or going to city hall. They can scale up to $ billion mergers Maybe the world would be a better place if you had influence over that kind of semi-arbitrary wealth transfer as opposed to whoever has it now.