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A cautionary thought: If you bring unbridled resentment towards a person, you lose the ability to learn from their strong points. Everyone human I've ever met

A cautionary thought: If you bring unbridled resentment towards a person, you lose the ability to learn from their strong points. Everyone human I've ever met is flawed. People seem to expect that once people become powerful, they should transcend and become unhumanly good, precise, unerring, and so on. It's hard. People are people, you just don't curse people when they make small mistakes that don't affect you. I'm as guilty as anyone else of this - lots of successful people that I think are yucky personalities. But I try to segregate out what I dislike about them from what I can learn from them. Anyone whose accomplished a lot certainly has some great qualities. If you can harness those while cutting the arrogance, egoism, cavalier attitude towards the people in their care - then you can become stronger yourself and make the world a better place. But I'm often guilty of the unbridled emotion thing, so take me with a grain of salt too.

time_management 18y ago
I don't expect highly successful people to be gods, or even heroes. I'm nowhere close to being either. I merely expect them to be as talented as I am, or at least on the same order of magnitude. Zuckerberg fails. Frankly, the blowout nature of his success results mainly from luck and positioning, as has been well-chronicled. If Zuckerberg had started Facebook at a state university, it would be just another obscure social networking site that was eventually clobbered by a superior competitor, instead of running over its then-superior competitors, as Facebook did in its early days. Facebook is now a reasonably strong product, but that has everything to do with the momentum it has developed (Harvard is high ground for prestige marketing, and it's easy to gain speed when each cardinal direction is downhill) and the quality of engineers it can get now, and absolutely nothing to do with Zuckerberg and his "vision".

time_management 18y ago

I don't expect highly successful people to be gods, or even heroes. I'm nowhere close to being either. I merely expect them to be as talented as I am, or at least on the same order of magnitude. Zuckerberg fails. Frankly, the blowout nature of his success results mainly from luck and positioning, as has been well-chronicled. If Zuckerberg had started Facebook at a state university, it would be just another obscure social networking site that was eventually clobbered by a superior competitor, instead of running over its then-superior competitors, as Facebook did in its early days. Facebook is now a reasonably strong product, but that has everything to do with the momentum it has developed (Harvard is high ground for prestige marketing, and it's easy to gain speed when each cardinal direction is downhill) and the quality of engineers it can get now, and absolutely nothing to do with Zuckerberg and his "vision".