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That there are successful entrepreneurs, or that some of them may give good advice, doesn't mean that he doesn't have a valid point about entrepreneurial advice

That there are successful entrepreneurs, or that some of them may give good advice, doesn't mean that he doesn't have a valid point about entrepreneurial advice as a genre. I think there are three keys to the problem: 1) readers want feel-good success stories, 2) successful people strongly benefit from positive PR, and 3) people often can't usefully talk about why they succeeded. The first, I think, is pretty obvious. The Hero's Journey long predates modern capitalism, but it very much gets applied. On top of that, add that readers want to feel positive, powerful, smart, enabled. So you can't just tell them, "Sure, you'd like to be rich like this guy, but take it from me, you're fucked from the get-go." There's a good critique of the corporate bio that relates: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/11/jeff-john-roberts-kings-of-crypto-the-heros-journey-of-coinbase/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/11/jeff-john-ro... The second bit means that business heroes are not going to tell you, here's my secret: be born at least moderately wealthy and well connected. They aren't going to tell you that past a certain levehttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-alll https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-... of wealth, it's basically impossible to go broke. They're instead going to make themselves seem both extraordinary and extra ordinary. See, e.g.: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-... And the third is something I'm sure many here have experienced. I started coding as a child, the son of a software developer. When people ask me how to get started as a developer, the honest answer is: I have no fucking idea. I have little recollection of how I learned, and I have no idea whether the parts that were easy for me would be easy for anybody else. I'll be positive and encouraging and give vague general advice. But if I talked about what worked for me, it would be very much in the vein of "here's the lottery ticket number I used", because my path was so personal.

physicles 4y ago
The third one resonates. As someone who also started coding at a young age, here’s what worked for me: 1. Have at least 10 free hours each week, 2. Get fanatically addicted to coding, 3. Repeat for 8 years and then do a four year CS degree. Pretty useless advice. Apropos the article, it’s easy to imagine there’s a similar lottery for most paths in life, including entrepreneurship. “Be born rich enough that you have the innate confidence that the universe will bend to your will” is a lottery I didn’t win. Surely, a kernel of the current political polarization is the left’s insistence that these lottery tickets matter, and the right’s insistence that the wealth they’re holding is the result of their own hard work. (To be clear, it’s a spectrum — tickets come in different sizes, and hard work plays a role — but such nuance has no place in public discourse)

physicles 4y ago

The third one resonates. As someone who also started coding at a young age, here’s what worked for me: 1. Have at least 10 free hours each week, 2. Get fanatically addicted to coding, 3. Repeat for 8 years and then do a four year CS degree. Pretty useless advice. Apropos the article, it’s easy to imagine there’s a similar lottery for most paths in life, including entrepreneurship. “Be born rich enough that you have the innate confidence that the universe will bend to your will” is a lottery I didn’t win. Surely, a kernel of the current political polarization is the left’s insistence that these lottery tickets matter, and the right’s insistence that the wealth they’re holding is the result of their own hard work. (To be clear, it’s a spectrum — tickets come in different sizes, and hard work plays a role — but such nuance has no place in public discourse)