Average is just average. There's no reason you need to be a multi-millionaire with 6 houses, 12 cars, and endless spending cash.
I also think that there should be more emphasis on separating personal/professional ambition from how much you earn. When people talk about career goals, they usually only mean "money making goals".
There's nothing wrong with working just enough to survive and finding satisfaction outside of spending money on crap you don't need. There's nothing "lazy" about making a living (even if its bare minimum to pay the essential bills).
What's the point in working 80 hour weeks for a set number of years, spending money excessively, and having a heart attack by age 50 from being over worked? Personally I'd rather be dead broke and happy then over worked and stressed about un-important crap.
That's not to say you shouldn't work hard towards your goals, they should just be defined out side of "make more money so I can impress my friends with a new car"
If you have a job that makes enough to afford the trappings of a comfortable life (place to live, enough left over to save, emergency account for if you get sick/injured, invest in retirement, etc.) and work 40 hours a week, you're in the minority.
Outside of HN, people aren't working 80 hour weeks because they're trying to be a millionaire, they're doing it because they need to pay rent. Anyone reading this site is almost by definition in the top 10%.
"Essential bills" as you put them can skyrocket at a moment's notice no matter how frugal you are. I watched my mom battle cancer for 10 years before she finally succumbed to it, and if my dad had had a lesser job it would have bankrupted us as a family. Furthermore I've seen said medical bankruptcy in some close friends, and that's just one of many things that can and do inevitably go wrong in life even for the best people. "Average" can turn to "destitute" in a matter of weeks.
My goal is for my fiancée and I to have enough in the bank for our future family to afford the best available solution to any problem we might have. Car gets totaled? I want to walk into a Carmax and come out with a $10-15,000 replacement the same day. We have a kid with special needs? I want to be able to afford the best teachers and schools there are. I get in an accident and have to go on half-pay for a few months? I want rent/mortage, groceries and other necessities taken care of. I'd also like to be able to afford 10+ years of medical care in my senior years and not risk going bankrupt.
Granted I'm only 29 and healthy with a good job, and my fiancée's working on getting her career started so we've got plenty of time and opportunity; but damn straight I'm going for millions, and I'll happily work 60+ hour weeks for decades to get there if that's what it takes. I'm not above taking vacations or breaks or weekends off, and I don't kill myself. I eat well, sleep well, exercise, have date night, etc. But I don't play nearly as many video games as younger me thought I would. :) It's worth it, and I sure as hell won't be squandering the effort on multiple houses or fancy cars.
Most people, not me, would also want to be able to afford a family/children.
Absolutely. I'm probably on the prolific end of the spectrum, but not with the end-goal to make money (although extra money would free me up to be even more prolific).
I think the end goal is to make the most out of this brief existence for whatever that's worth (and for whatever you take "most" to mean).
I create, therefore I am.
At least that seems to be the way I turned out.
Like, I get that HN is "whatever hackers find interesting". But to come here and fill the comment section with discussion about how we'd all be better off not trying particularly hard is just obnoxious. Literally everywhere else on the internet is the right place for that.
I'm sure some blue collar workers would think that startup people are lazy without producing much perceived value to society but still getting rich.
I think it's good to know what you want in life, and know what makes you happy and then follow that, whatever it may be (assuming it's not harming others etc.). Or at the very least, know what makes you miserable and stop doing that.
They took two equivalent classes of pottery students. Group A was told that they'd be graded based on the number of pieces made, while group B was based off the quality of a single submitted piece. Following the given incentives involved, group A made a bunch of pottery, while group B tried really hard at making good pottery.
What's interesting is at the end of the class, group A's pottery was better than group B's. Making a lot of pottery without caring about the quality of any individual piece is better at making high quality pottery.
The key takeaway I got is that you're generally able to magically become better at things you do a lot of. So if you want to get good at something, just do it more, and results will generally follow.
The story you're repeating is a parable, published in a book called "Art & Fear" (as sibling commenters have noted).
There is no evidence in that book that it's anything other than a fabrication, argumentation from "just-so story".
I happen to believe the theory, personally. But the ceramics story is not evidence at all that the theory is correct. It's just a bald-faced assertion.
I worked in construction a while ago. I was always slow, pedantic, and the work i did usually reflected that (usually, some things benefit from being done fast). Everybody kept telling me that i was slow so one day i said "f it" and started working faster. The quality of work went down, for obvious reasons, and never got to the quality that was before (for most of it, some work like cutting things to size stayed precise). But if you, for example, paint a hundred windows really fast, you will probably not find many windows painted nicely. (mind you that nobody notices the little imperfections in construction, like, for example, a drop of white wall paint on the white radiator pipe)
Of course doing more means learning more, but so does thinking and experimenting.
Pottery, i never tried, but i assume it is more about the "feel" then anything else. While programming benefits a lot more from learning random stuff. It's easier to write a huge mess of code that works fine then it is to make a huge pot that doesn't fall apart.
All in all, why not bout ? Hack some 100 programs quickly, and write a couple programs with lots of preparation and research.
On the other hand, coming from construction too, I would assume your coworkers were teasing you, rather than really fuss over the speed of the new kid. ;)
I.e., Making a lot of pottery without caring about the individual quality leads to more learning (possibly because you can try lots of new stuff without fear of failure, possibly because when you find something that works you can keep practicing it, etc, etc).
Once you know what you're doing I can't imagine that blasting through something in a half-assed fashion produces better results than carefully doing a thoughtful job.
PROTIP: Google will often tell you these things!
Point being, most people don't have what it takes to cut it, so might as well aim for a really high investment of time and effort, and eventually plenty of walls will arise. For me, it took somewhere in the neighborhood of "5 Walls" before I could become cross-genre competent, and I've still got Wall #6 I'm kind of reluctantly ignoring (sweep picking, FWIW).
Most people give up around Wall #3, playing through extremely painful finger tips to the point of growing useful callouses (the kind you can stick a safety pin through and not draw blood).
A lot of this discussion tends to have trouble differentiating between "Imaginative Genius" and "Craft Expertise" and basically what we call "Success" is a labor of love, passion, or lunacy somewhere in the middle.
Source please.
It's what makes Amazon so profitable and AliBaba such a threat. It's the "longtail" business model, but for ideas. Like Linus Pauling said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."
patio11 has a phrase: "increase the luck surface", and it is kin to this as well. If % of Making It is 1 in 500, then it's much more straightforward to increase the number of dice rolls than to attempt the perfection of your roll.
This also ties into the findings about grit, or perseverance through rough patches. Grit and trying over and over, learning each time, is a pretty good predictor of some decent success.
In my own career, I've found that being aggressively prolific is key to getting better. Careful tweaking so as not doing the same thing over and over is hugely important as well: searching the learning hillclimb for improvement.
Nvm. Reference : http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...
Gibbon on the other hand in 6 volumes wrote a work that will probably be in print until Western Civilisation sinks into the dust.
So - kinda depends I would say.
As a side note, I also find it amusing that you expect Churchill's "aura" to fade. If current trends are any indication, he's moving toward folk tale hero status rather than the slow march toward obscurity (with multiple appearances in Doctor Who and other fictional media). In my opinion, the only thing that potentially stands in the way is a possible upheaval of the Western power base or an Alexandria style purge of knowledge. I say this as a US citizen who is much too young to remember the fall out of the war, much less the war itself.
I've never heard this figure of speech and Google isn't turning anything up. What does it mean?
That said, be prolific and deep...try not to repeat yourself depending on what you're doing but go deeper...
Aaron Levie of box.com I believe started 10 different websites and box.com was the one that took off.
A friend of mine in Japan started 3 companies...and only 1 took off...initially all 3 looked equally promising. Imagine if he took 2 years per experiment and gave up after 2 of the 3.
The hit rate of Beethoven between masterpiece and so-so piece was relatively steady in his middle and late periods.
Often works that are pre-planned "masterpieces" slaved over fail to engage, while some things made quickly live forever...think of Leonardo's drawing the Vitruvian Man, a quick sketch that's one of the most famous drawings in the world vs. his destroyed or not-made (I forget) statue of a horse (it is being re-built by someone and the world is still not taking much notice).
Google, Amazon, etc...how many failures do they have, if you look at that list they'd look like giant failures...remember Google Knol? The wikipedia killer. Or Amazon Fire Phone? Really embarrassing...do they care? Not at all! They simply don't care...but it's a little bit because despite a hundred failures, two of the more experimental things they did become $100 billion dollar businesses namely Android and AWS.
So we see there should be a minimal acceptable quality for whatever you're doing, and if this is exceeded then by all means push out the volume.
The question then becomes, how to tell whether you're meeting the quality threshold?
I do agree that trying to be original is a red herring though. In a sea of mediocrity, being good is an original outcome in its own right.
They probably weren't making lists of topics they wanted to study one day and getting stuck not even starting.
Is that common? I have this problem of making lists of things that I want to do, but typically it doesn't get much further than that. I feel like a constantly plan, but never do anything.
Also, I agree regarding those that may have selectively published, it doesn't mean that they weren't incredibly prolific.
Woah, that is insane.
Are all Dumas novels written this way? Even the 'big' ones like Count of MC and Three musketeers?
Television soap operas are also impressive in purely quantitative terms, but that doesn't make them good, does it?
Writing comes really easily to me (many of you would say a bit too easily, considering my tendency to drop 1000 word comments on HN). I really don't think the route to quality is just churning out as much as possible; if anything, you run the risk of getting some small success and then churning out that lowish-level of quality for as long as the money keeps flowing. It's very obvious from a day reading blogs or magazines that there is a flourishing market for bad writing. In my view, the best way to improve your writing is to read. Read a lot, be snobbish about the quality of what you read, invest effort in reading stuff you find difficult to understand. Many people pursue style at the expense of learning how to write substantively; this is the literary equivalent of painting pictures with glitter. You might produce a masterpiece after a while, but more likely whatever you do is going to look really tacky.
It's easier to get paid if you're prolific and can churn out lots of material on demand. But you're also putting a ceiling on the quality of your output and probably your earning power. If you want to go good work, learn to work slowly and without the validation (and dopamine hit) that comes from a quick turnaround. I paint now and have a mix of simple things that I know out quickly and large difficult pieces that I labor over for months at a time and that are likely not that interesting or easy to appreciate to the casual glance. I like both kinds, but guess which ones have priority if the house catches fire.
Passion is a simple advantage because it gives you the focus, the persistence, and the satisfaction needed to keep practicing efficiently.
Maybe it'll take 10 years to do what a genius could accomplish in 1, but if the genius is working on something else, it's all you. But even if not, your body of work will be different.
The shortest path to an idea may require disparate ideas.
I know I'm only rephrasing the headline, but the article's point follows easily from this model of how thoughts are structured in Memory Evolutive Neural Systems.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.004
(to read for free, go to https://sci-hub.bz and search for 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.004)
EDIT: To be clear, the point follows easily from the model, which says nothing about what's required to understand the model.
"...[Louis] wished he could be like Carlin and do new albums and specials every year — all of them brilliant. It wasn’t until much later in his career that C.K. would get the important advice from Carlin to throw out all of his material every year and start fresh..."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/06/louis-ck-honors-geo...
https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...
"The surprising habits of original thinkers"
https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_o...
For example, I've spent most of my time recently as a writer, and found that it's been almost impossible to tell what works will become popular and what won't. You can throw something out in minutes and have tons of people sharing it and liking it, or spend months researching a piece and find that no one gives a toss.
But (somewhat sadly), I'm not sure I'd agree with the article that:
> being prolific doesn’t give you an excuse to get sloppy and start blurting out half formed ideas – that’s just going to piss off everyone apart from your mum. Your work still needs to be the very best you can do.
Because somewhat unfortunately, that's exactly what search engines and social networks kind of want now. They want quick responses to breaking news and trends, not well thought out pieces that take all the facts and views into consideration.
Look at YouTube for example. Many popular channels there basically cash in on whatever the latest controversy or drama is, usually within about a day of it occurring. A lot of popular games and apps are ones that literally just cash in on a recent trend, quality be kind of damned (see that Mega Man Xover 'fan game' which showed you could copy Capcom's product by spending 5 minutes in Flash or various game mods and stuff which stick Donald Trump into existing games). And when news is concerned... well, the most successful papers and sites (as far as traffic is concerned) are those that rush out stories as quickly as possible. Someone who watched yesterday's Pokemon themed Nintendo Direct would get a lot more clicks if they capitalised on the typo that said it'd released for the Switch rather than if they waited for more facts before proceeding.
So being prolific definitely helps more than trying to be 'original' and focusing too much on any one piece. But I'd also say the setup on a lot of modern internet sites actually goes further and kind of advantages people who can just get stuff done quickly in general, quality be damned.
In the absence of either I do think it's valuable to try more things in parallel to see what works, and not get put off by 'failures' (experience you gained just after you needed it), or not being 'perfect' (since there rarely is such a thing, objectively).
I have observed that authors tend to go downhill once they are known. The pressure to publish (more money I guess), along with name recognition meaning they don't have to put out quality work is my theory.
Hard work and practice pretty much always makes one better.
I would rather make less and be happy.
