[amadeuspagel]

A particular type of essay that HN is an absolute sucker for — an awesome type of person that you're supposed to identify with. Paint Drip Person. T-Shaped Person. Paul Graham has also written a bunch of these, so maybe it's just in the DNA of the site.

I guess the classical example of this is the renaissance man, but that at least required different fields like art and science and not different kinds of programming.

[Applejinx]

It's a certain kind of content. I might invoke Godin's Law (not Godwin, Godin): the evocation of an idea feels better and more significant if you leave it extremely vague, and draw no useful conclusions from it :)

Put any of this stuff into practice and you run into practical issues, and it's way less interesting.

I'm definitely a paint drip dude and it's not at all useful. In the absence of a team of cultists to do my bidding, any paint drip that stops is then useless to go further, and the metaphor breaks down. It becomes 'abstractly looking at a pile of uncompleted projects', and even when my job is coming up with stuff of that nature, I have to finish the stuff for it to matter, even to me.

Don't be a drip: 'real artists ship' :)

[jhawleypeters]

I have two friends. One lives by “Don’t be a drip, ‘real artists ship’”. He’s got ~20 products shipped. The other friend drips hard, with a comparable number of projects abandoned over a comparable timeframe.

Both spent about two decades living in near poverty and only recently experienced financial success.

I don’t believe telling either of them to switch strategies would have been helpful.

We could infer from these two cases that “don’t give up” is the unifying factor, and that that’s helpful advice. I think history is littered with counter examples. Giving up may not be psychologically healthy (or advisable), but advising somebody “don’t give up” can still be cruel and unhelpful. Resisting the urge to give advice may be kindest.

I suspect most advice broadcast on the internet does more to inflate the author’s reputation than to help the audience. Even if this is true, it doesn’t rule out the possibility of a small quantity of exceptional advice having an outsized positive impact that outweighs the over abundance of reputation inflating advice.

[istjohn]

Yes, these post-hoc explanations for why someone is successful allow us to indulge in fantasies of success without providing any actionable advice that has actual empirical evidence.

[adfm]

I still get a kick out of the fact that the person that came up with Nerd Merit Badges is the same person that came up with the term fullstack and almost nobody mentions it or even gets the original meaning of the term.

[cachvico]

That is very interesting - found your older post pointing to https://web.archive.org/web/20110210194715/http://forge38.co...

So actually a full-stack developer, according to the person who coined the term, is not just someone who can do backend and front-end, but you need to have the design (and business) chops too.

[adfm]

Yep! There’s a lot of cargo-culting in the valley for sure.

It’s deep cuts like this that make hn worth the read. Cheers!

[gottorf]

Why such a needlessly pessimistic view? I think this "paint drip" imagery is a cute way to describe the characteristics of success described therein.

[oh_sigh]

Except the "paint drip" aspect of this successful person might be entirely irrelevant to their success. Imagine if Keith ate oatmeal every day for breakfast, and there was an "Oatmeal people" article describing why eating oatmeal for breakfast is the key to Ken's success. After all, it gives him long lasting energy, having a routine can be useful, it is simple to prepare and you can think about other things while making it, etc.

Or, for every "paint drip person", you might find another person who is equally as successful and devoted their entire energy to a single project or idea.

[thrashh]

Well let’s say I find a super successful restaurant that makes its burritos one way. I’m amazed. I’m inspired. I write a book about it and describe the specific ways that they do things that make them successful.

Then a few years later, I find another super successful burrito restaurant. They make it completely opposite to what I wrote in my book.

It turns out the reasons for success runs deeper than the superficial things that you see people do day to day.

For every successful person that reads a book a week, there’s probably 5 that just laze on the couch.

[gottorf]

> For every successful person that reads a book a week, there’s probably 5 that just laze on the couch.

I understand that not every successful person reads a book a week (or s/a book a week/any other "productive" habit often bandied about in articles like this), but I really doubt that very many successful people habitually laze on the couch.

[istjohn]

There are worse vices than indulging in self-help cotton candy, but we should see it for what it is.