One view is that paying close attention to someone, praising their acumen and acting like they know the secrets to the universe, is essentially a kind of sycophantic behavior. Like most such behavior the goal isn’t emulation of behavior to emulate result, but to gain favor. Powerful, successful people like to build mythologies, and have a habit of rewarding people who flatter that myth, and punishing those who don’t. So when a lot of people stand in awe of someone who holds the purse strings to their dreams, it pays to really consider their motives.
For the average person buying a “How I Made My First Billion” book, it’s just that they’re unaware of anything, but the myth. Since the myth is being propagated by very smart and successful people, it’s that much more convincing to them. In turn the myth makes getting investment and ‘airtime’ easier, which feeds back into success. The mistake people make is thinking that Fake It Till You Make It ends at success, truthfully it only ramps up then.
Edit: This isn’t to say that the likes of Altman, Gates and others are not genuinely intelligent and capable, just that the magnitude of their success isn’t something you can reliably copy, or that beyond their core competence, they have any special insight. Yet the myth tends to extend far beyond that, and I think unjustifiably, although understandably so.
I’m reminded of the coin toss example in one of my college classes. Everyone in the class stood up and flipped a coin. If it was tails you lose and sit down. Flip again and again until there was only one person standing. Then the prof “interviewed” him to ask him how he became such a good heads-flipper and what advice he had for other aspiring heads-flippers.
Listening only to people who struck it rich in business is like getting lottery advice from only lottery winners.
>If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.
Someone in the industry, someone with considerable influence, someone active on this very forum, once told me when asked what their secret was "I worry it's been more luck than skill".
At the time my immediate thought was "bullshit, you had to have busted your ass but your background also had to have had great influence but hey fine, don't tell me". But as time has passed, much reflection, looking at their peers I now fully believe it. It was largely luck. While the individual had an interesting idea which started their journey towards success, they've had fortunate event/connection after fortunate event/connection that have allowed them to get where they are today. That has allowed them to be doing what they want to do, pursuing what they want to be pursuing, working towards a goal that they want more than anything else.
I'd say 10% idea, 20% work ethic, 70% luck.
Wish I had some luck (and maybe the ability to pass some hindsight of my personal life back to a much younger me so I'd have gotten a degree, avoided my personal bankruptcy and thus been in a much better position to actually get opportunities but alas).
In a lot of cases I would say that working your ass off basically buys you the lottery ticket, but whether it pays off is largely luck. Innate talent and ability might skew the odds in your favor slightly, but I think it's more likely that they just lower the work-cost of the lottery ticket.
Exactly. You cannot make it without luck (you need to be in the right place at the right time), but you greatly improve your chances if you are at the right place most of the time.
There is an element of luck with anything in life: Being in the right place at the right time, being the right person as well as recognizing the opportunity. SV is a lucky place, YC is a lucky place, Stanford (or even a University) is a lucky place. How do you get to those places? You typically have to work hard at something to get the opportunity.
I totally listen to reasonable people talking about reasonable things. However, I would never use the reason that somebody is a billionaire to pay more attention.
Let me give you examples.
Elon Musk in Windows (I disagree with him, even in 2000, Linux kernel version 2.2.12-20, RedHat version 6.1 --old versioning--)
"In the year of 2000, Windows is considered much better than good old Unix platform. Musk wanted to move all technologies from UNIX to Windows platform. But, Unix zealots like Max Levchian (Co-founder of Confinity[1]) and his team disagreed with Elon. A holy war started, and Elon Musk lost the battle. The board fired Elon in October 2000, and appointed Peter Thiel as new CEO. Elon officially left the company's day to day operations by 2001, though he stayed on in an advisory role and as the largest shareholder."
Jeff Bezos Mandate, internal APIs (I agree with him 80% of his points, not because he is billionaire but because his argument is reasonable for the size of company he was running at the time)
"
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
"
And so on. After working with many millionaires and billionaires I just realised that it does not matter what they say without a good argument, I have seen CEOs fired just like Elon Musk over decisions similar to move the company stack to Windows and I also have seen CEOs listening to staff and making an intelligent decision that moved the company forward. I definitely like to listen to people with reasonable arguments, especially if the things they are suggesting works.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with the Bezos thing?
It's maybe a little dogmatic, but it also means that any useful internal tools can be turned into an AWS service, which seems like it's been a decent strategy for Amazon.
Slight tangent: at one company, years after Yegge’s blog post, a senior manager presented those principles as his own cunningly developed strategy. The ridicule was palpable.
For the average person buying a “How I Made My First Billion” book, it’s just that they’re unaware of anything, but the myth. Since the myth is being propagated by very smart and successful people, it’s that much more convincing to them. In turn the myth makes getting investment and ‘airtime’ easier, which feeds back into success. The mistake people make is thinking that Fake It Till You Make It ends at success, truthfully it only ramps up then.
Edit: This isn’t to say that the likes of Altman, Gates and others are not genuinely intelligent and capable, just that the magnitude of their success isn’t something you can reliably copy, or that beyond their core competence, they have any special insight. Yet the myth tends to extend far beyond that, and I think unjustifiably, although understandably so.