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Why obsessively following successful people online is dangerous
- giantg2 5y agoI stopped following a bunch of people on LinkedIn. It seemed like all they did was repost stuff from others - mostly infographics. None of the information was even helpful to an IC like me.
- durmonski 5y agoFollowing more and more people leads to more time wasted.
- kritiko 5y agoWhat exactly is it that you do? I must say, I'm envious of "thought leaders" but the net result seems to always lead back to "create your own knowledge product and sell it to other people."
- slightwinder 5y agoIsn't everything done obsessively dangerous?
- tus89 5y agoEven browsing HN?
- philwelch 5y agoYeah, it kind of reminds me of when they used to say we shouldn't panic about the coronavirus. Of course you shouldn't panic, because panic isn't a productive response, but you should anticipate, prepare for, and mitigate risks. Of course, then the people who told us not to panic about the coronavirus ended up panicking about the coronavirus because when they said "don't panic", they meant, "ignore the problem until you are overwhelmed by it", which is exactly what leads people to panic in the first place.
- ducktective 5y agoWhat about reading on all the cool things people create on HN?
- adolph 5y agoThere's some fine print at the bottom about patio11 being ok.
- lbriner 5y agoPeople mostly don't know how to measure advice. You ask one person and they tell you "it's all about marketing", someone else will say that "technical excellence is more important than anything else". Even though a lot of advice is contradictory and very context-dependent, people don't notice this and lap it up. The truth is that probably most successful people can't tell luck, serendipity and hard-work from wisdom. Times change, opportunities change etc. so how much is advice really worth? The only good advice is an answer to a specific question with very clear boundaries: "How much is a good amount to spend on Facebook advertising?", "If you have a product aimed at the mass market and you can correlate success of click-throughs, spend as much as you want as long as it's less than what you make per-click". Otherwise you get stuff like, "Facebook is great value for money" or "Facebook is a disaster" both useless pieces of advice. I also suspect that those with the correct brain for business probably don't need very much advice because they will quickly work things out themselves.
- k__ 5y agothis. I'm a dev/tech blogger, and I can say, following the right people is half of the success. Not just because of the things they say, but because they can share your work. Every time my work was shared by an influencer in the field, I got one or multiple job/project offers and over the years I made a good living out of it. "being good at tech" only helps in the next step, when you need to proof that you can write better about a tech topic than the average marketeer/content creator.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoI've noticed that people are uncomfortable with nuance.
- mattgreenrocks 5y agoThe "learn the secrets of how $SUCCESSFUL_PERSON did $SUCCESSFUL_THING!" is almost always garbage content. Despite that, it's a massive, massive "industry," that will never die. Once you see the extent of the Matthew Effect [1], it's hard to unsee it. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
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- LurkingPenguin 5y agoThere are some interesting observations here, but the piece basically ends up in the same place all self-help content ends up: here are the x things you should do. > Instead of just watching, reading, listening to other people doing fancy stuff. We need to get going. Overcome the general feeling of malaise by start running, failing, getting up, and trying again. This is basically the same advice that a lot of self-help gurus give. The only difference is in the packaging. Here's a tangential piece of advice about listening to "successful people online": not everything is as it appears. In fact, much of the time these days, it isn't. Never forget that you have no way of knowing whether people are as happy, rich, etc. as they say they are, and even if they are, you have no way of knowing whether or not the advice they're selling you is how they got to where they are.
- yupper32 5y agoThe title doesn't really match the advice. The advice is separate from the number of successful people you follow online. The advice is simply to follow through with the tips you see from the successful people you follow with some tips on how to do that. Very meta. I do find a bunch of irony in the dissing of self-help books, when you could copy-paste this entire article verbatim into like half the self-help books out of there and it'd fit right in.
- randycupertino 5y agoI have a friend who is going through a harrowing divorce, cheating on both sides, lots of family drama, she tried to light his car on fire, police called by neighbors for fighting, etc. On Instagram he and his (soon to be ex) wife just tagged themselves this weekend putting up Halloween decorations, all smiley buying pumpkins and cooking truffle mac and cheese, liking each other's posts. Meanwhile he is calling me at 1:30am asking if he can come sleep on our couch. I kind of want to ask him about the discrepancy between his online persona vs real life, but I don't want to offend him.
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- nradov 5y agoBefore Instagram, many families would send out Christmas update letters to all their friends and relatives full of almost entirely happy news. Then you'd hear about the pending divorce a few months later. People haven't changed.
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- bhouston 5y agoPerfect Instagram is a skill you can deploy and unrelated to whether you are actually happy. Case in point: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/09/16/police-compare-notes/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/09/16/police-compare-notes/. There were multiple photogenic posts of smiling people in the weeks leading up to the murder, when they were fighting a lot of the time.
- tombert 5y agoObviously I don't know your friend, but as someone who has dealt with depression and whatnot constantly for most of my life, and intermittently since I started medication four years ago, I can tell you that it's not terribly hard to make yourself seem happy and content online. It's almost easier to appear happy online when you know you're not; you don't want people to try and offer you unsolicited advice about how "exercise worked for them" or "changing to this particular diet changed my life" or crap like that, so you fake it [1]. You only post things that you think are interesting, you minimize how much you talk about your personal life, and when you do it's only to flex about something cool you did. Whenever I did open up to friends later about my mental health stuff, they were always really surprised to hear it, and that was by design. [1] To be clear, I'm not knocking diet and exercise. If you're feeling depressed, eating healthier and getting regular exercise is probably the best (and cheapest) place to start, and offers a bunch of other benefits too. My life did improve when I stopped eating Taco Bell ever day.
- jordanmorgan10 5y agoTL;DR Seems to be the old adage since the early days of self-help content: Don't dwell, do.
- hidden-spyder 5y agoI'm having trouble understanding that adage. Would you please elaborate on it?
- bryceacc 5y agodwelling would be thinking about doing things. People often get caught up in the research portion of vacations or hobbies and they just watch videos and read articles about it or scroll through hashtags of the subject on twitter or instagram but never actually get about doing the task. So don't think about doing it, actually go out and do it
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- marcodiego 5y agoPossible more relevant hypothesis: Why Obsessively Following People Is Dangerous.
- munk-a 5y agoOr an even more general one: Why Obsessing Over Vicarious Actions is Dangerous. Everyone needs to live their own life and do what's right for them. Whether your life looks like your glamorous neighbors or not shouldn't matter to you.
- snvzz 5y agoThe essence: obsessively --> dangerous.
- marcodiego 5y agoHmmm... I don't know... Being obsessive for a short periods of time may be even required to reach some high achievements. My fingers bled, but I learned "Tico-tico no fubá".
- snvzz 5y ago>My fingers bled Dangerous. Q.E.D.
- sylens 5y agoI was excited to click through to this but was a little disappointed when I read it because it wasn't discussing what I was hoping for. I think there's also an issue where you can follow a bunch of people that are already very successful and at the top of their fields on Twitter; they comment on the latest news, post their big conference talks, their brand new tool on Github, etc. You may have had a very unproductive day (or week) at work, and seeing these other people continue to ascend and excel makes you feel like you are not working hard enough. If only you picked up that new front-end framework. If only you went and got another certification. If only you created your own side hustle and turned it into a profitable business. There are benefits to surrounding yourself with motivated, successful people - it can also create and foster a drive in you. But it's also important that you can relax and take the night off after work , even if you're not keeping pace with the most vocal and prominent avatars.
- georgewsinger 5y agoI have the opposite complaint of OP (though technically orthogonal to his point). I'm extremely annoyed at having to sift through the thousands upon thousands of self-help tidbits and life tip nuggets that fledgling VCs and founders -- who have accomplished *literally nothing whatsoever* once you round down -- offer on social media platforms. I'm talking about people who have written 100 small checks, but who haven't hit even a single grand slam. Or entrepreneurs who built an incremental SaaS business and got acquihired 5 years ago, and think that people need to hear their hot takes about success and life. It's extremely annoying. On the other hand, I really enjoy the occasional pieces of fluff and advice offered by, e.g., the true outliers (e.g., the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels walking among us; the people have have actually come into contact with reality and accomplished non-trivial things that are very hard to repeat and generalize from). Not just tech billionaires; I think the same for the comparably successful scientists and technologists. These people can't give you cookie cutter formulas for success other than "try to break other formulas". It's still inspirational, IMO, and far preferable coming from them than the phonies on Twitter seeking validation and fame.
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- iratewizard 5y agoAnd here I thought that following successful people was the one obsessive behavior that wasn't dangerous. Thank you for your blog spam.
- iainctduncan 5y agoI stopped reading after the fifth one sentence paragraph or so. Author needs to stop reading successful bloggers telling them how to write for the internet. It just seemed to me like the article style was a symptom of the problem it was supposedly about. That kind of writing is so bloody annoying please read some books and then write more.
- danuker 5y agoI am also guilty of this. Can you give me an example of a blogpost you enjoyed reading?
- 0des 5y agoLondon Review of Books has quite a few.
- xmprt 5y agoI agree. I don't even mind short paragraphs because I think they can be used for good effect but not if it's every single paragraph. It just strikes me as lazy writing. If each sentence is its own paragraph then you don't have to worry about structuring the article well or writing transitions or intro/outro sentences.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoIt’s called broetry.
- robohoe 5y agoThis maybe just an anecdotal conjecture, but I've noticed this a lot lately with many news sites. It seems that with the advent of social media and smart phones, our attention spans have drastically shortened. Now all the articles have paragraphs that are 2-3 sentences long.
- Wistar 5y agoIn between which are often gratuitous photos and ads.
- mikeInAlaska 5y ago> Why Obsessively Following Successful People Online Is Dangerous Facebook Network Admins Are Doing Their Part To Reduce The Risk
- wolverine876 5y agoHere's a reason that seems obvious to me: Cults of personality are dangerous, for cult members and for the community. Among other things, they are delusional; they aren't reality. Also, they give far too much power to the personality. Why has that obvious knowledge been forgotten? Have we forgotten to be skeptical?
- raspasov 5y agoDon’t listen to what successful people say. Watch what they do.
- Underphil 5y agoWhich in many cases is morally questionable or downright illegal.
- quickthrower2 5y agoReminds me of the Genesis - Jesus He Knows Me song. Actually those lyrics pretty much sum this all up :-).
- theyx 5y agoAnd watch what their family has done to put them in the condition they are today. Most rich people are rich because of inheritance.
- raspasov 5y agoSimply receiving an inheritance does not qualify as success, IMO.
- pdimitar 5y agoSorry to interject with something more generic but I feel it's somewhat pertinent. And sorry for the gray beard tone. Here it comes: --- Obsessively following anything or anyone is not good for you and that's very likely a 99% universal advice. I was super good at multi-tasking all my life... until 2-3 years ago my brain started resisting me and sabotaging me at every turn. Gradually I realized that I am gulping waaaaaaaay too much information online; not just HN but favourite forums like ElixirForum, Rust Users, OCaml, and a few very big subreddits on top of that. Starting to gradually dial down things did wonders. Even today I still insist on checking 2 outlets from the above listing and I am working on eliminating my fear of missing out. So far a good compromise has been to never check them during this or that hours. And even that helps. --- Here's something even more generic as an advice but I also feel it applies well, especially nowadays with all the distractions that bombard us: Do your own thing. Develop problem-solving skills. All the out-of-context advice is still out there. If one day you need it, you can get metric tons of it in minutes. Start focusing. Start analyzing your own life, your own personal / work faults, and optimize for your own unique circumstances. Treat your life (or whatever part of it you want improved) as an optimization problem and work on that.
- data_required 5y agoLovely practical comment, seems almost universally applicable, thank you :). Especially this bit: >If one day you need it, you can get metric tons of it in minutes.
- SkyBelow 5y ago>Obsessively following anything or anyone is not good for you and that's very likely a 99% universal advice. I think the problem with reducing the advice to this level is that it reduces away the idea that some information is much less healthy than other information. When you follow other people online, you are always learning from the information you gather. The problem is that you aren't always aware of what you are learning. If one is constantly following very successful people, they are learning how filled with the success the life of others are. This begins to contrast the lack of success in their own life. Not that their life lacks any success, but it isn't filled with only success. You get a false impression of the life of others which results in an unhealthy judgment of your own life. This can become a significant problem on social media and one that I've seen brought up before in regards to teens and instagram. The older one is the more life experience and other sources of learning one has and thus the less susceptible to the effect, but less susceptible doesn't mean immune. In contrast there is a flood of other information that isn't as toxic. Follow your favorite hobby by someone who shows both their success and failures and you don't risk building the same unrealistic picture. Follow a bunch of information largely freed from daily grind, like watching videos that dig into math, history, and science and you would have even less risk. That's not to say you can just assume the information has no risks at all, addiction and such are still a concern, but short of some very specific scenarios I would find it much safer to consume. It is like telling someone to not overeat. While that's good advice, it is important to make sure the person you are talking to understands that overeating refined sugar and fats are much more a threat than overeating vegetables. Such an example almost feels silly because of how common sense the information feels, but when it comes to following people and information sources online I find people aren't as well informed as to what is the deep fried refined sugar and what is the vitamin packed fiber.
- WalterBright 5y agoWhen I go on trips, I don't go online. It's interesting that I don't miss it.
- ssimoni 5y agoI think the reason to not follow successful people online is that they did not get successful by following successful people online. Meaning - they have a big online presence post-success. They use the online presence to bask in their own glory. But this isn’t just for the sake of basking in ones glory. It is a sort of way for the successful person to leverage their success into more success. A positive feedback loop of sorts.
- paxys 5y agoAnother thing this doesn't touch upon is – what made these online "influencers" successful in the first place? Was it following all the advice that they love to dole out on Twitter and LinkedIn? Or the fact that they got lucky with a tech investment and/or were at the right place at the right time? The tech world is full of these personalities. Ultimately most of them (and the rest of us) are monkeys throwing darts. Some get lucky, others don't.