[bpatrianakos]

Thank you for this. I can't believe anyone would applaud this mindset. For some reason we seem to applaud extremist views here and don't stop to think about how practical or unhealthy they are. There's a small minority of the population that has found success in being extreme in some way but we are not those people. We want to be though. We want to be the Steve Jobs or the Elon Musk or the Richard Stallman that has these eccentricities, these rare and extreme personality traits, these strongly held views and model ourselves after them all the while thinking "if he can do it, so can I" and duping ourselves into believing these things are okay. That we'll be the lucky ones who are able to pull it off. And when someone with a little star power like TBray says something like this we want to jump all over it because we believe that this will help us make it to the top and be like them.

But it won't. These people have some great advice and knowledge to share and I, like the rest of us, are more than willing to take it in and implement it but an article like this is dangerous and not good advice. But it's hard to recognize that when it comes from someone prominent because if they're so successful and they think like that then logic dictates that if we do it too we'll have an advantage, right? Not always. Each of us perceives the world differently and we gt by in our own unique way. I guarantee that if any one of us normals became prominent figured and successful in startup culture then there'd be stories and legends of some obscure thing we do that made us successful. I'd also be willing to bet we write about some of those things and people would cling to every word, applaud it, and think to themselves "I've gotta try that!" whether it was a good idea or not. It's not that anyone is trying to give bad advice, it's just that we don't know it.