I like Graham's points about overconfidence, peer groups and (judicious amounts of) ignorance, all of which he champions quite strongly. But drilling deeper on "rate of change" is an undervalued element that deserves a closer look.
The best innovators are really good at taking Version 1.0 and figuring out what rework will turn it into a better 2.0, and then 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, etc. This is an identifiable skill! It can be cultivated. Once you've got it, the failings of Version 1.0 do not ruin your self-esteem. You just get to work on fixing them. And not enough people think about this systematically.
One of my favorite museum stops of all time was the British Library, where a glass case held Paul McCartney's first draft of "Yesterday." You could see, cross-out by cross-out, how a somewhat awkward ballad got turned into a pop classic.
I'll submit that almost everything that looks like genius from a distance is a lot of step-by-step craft when viewed more closely. I did some consulting at Facebook in 2008 and it was quite amazing seeing how rapidly and incessantly Team Zuckerberg was not just adding features, but also rejiggering the way the feed worked; the layout, the everything.
Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into.
> Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into.
Yeah...but the other side of that depends on what the definition of “dodgy” is.
For example, say we have a server-based app. If the DB schema is badly-designed (usually overcomplicated), then we are truly pooched, as we’ll start to figure that out after we have a few thousand users.
If the DB design is OK, even if it is primitive and simple, then we can have naive, problematic code, yet plenty of room to grow.
I’ve learned to design for the unknown. It’s really paid off, for me, but YMMV.
There are two places where it is possible to see early, "lame" work. One is YouTube - most channels with well-made videos would retain their earliest works, and the first few dozen can be quite instructive.
Second is GitHub - the first few hundred commits of many successful open-source projects. It is a wonder to see sprawling codebases starting at its first commit, and plodding its way over years before gathering momentum.
Webcomics work that way - quite a few webcomics have been written over the course of many years, and you can see the art style slowly changing and the artist's skill improving.
You don't notice it if you're subscribing/following the comic, until you jump back to an earlier strip and see how much less skilled the early work was.
One of my favorite podcasts [1] is a great example of this. A friend recommended it to me and told me to start at the beginning (already a couple years of back catalog at that point). I almost stopped after the first few episodes, which were interesting but not very well produced.
The creator stuck with it though and the quality improved dramatically and pretty quickly.
Foot note number 8 of the essay notes that Michael Nielsen made the same two observations when reading an early version of the essay. For some reason Paul Graham has decided to make the footnote labels almost invisible in the text of the essay. I agree that it is best that in short essay reading that skipping the footnotes until reading the whole essay is usually the best way to approach them, but I like when they were more visable. In the spirit of the essay though, it is nice he has not changed older essays to fit this new style and one can go back and see the footnote indicators get lighter over time.
I had one thought forming while reading this piece, then read to Carmack's quote in the footnote which encapsulated it. I learned how to program modding games as a teenager, and as an adult now looking back on it, I realize how rough and ready the game engines were in 1996-1998, and how that rough and ready state, combined with my teenager's imbalance between time and money, led to a bunch of what Graham is calling early work where my bad 3d modeling skills, terrible art sense, and ability to sling values around in text files and use tools that other community members made, allowed me to make an entire faction for Total Annihilation that was clearly lower quality than the originals, but really not that much worse. Contrast that to about 2017 when I looked into what it would take to make a very small mod for XCOM, and boy oh boy, so much more work. What advantages I gained from being in that place at that time...
This is an important and often overlooked aspect to creativity.
When people get into some thing, they naturally compare themselves to the people out there that are best at that thing. In Ye Olden days before the Internet and social media meant literally the world's best examples of every single thing were right at your fingertips, the "best" often meant "the best in your town" and the level of difference between your novice skill and that was not so great as to be disheartening.
But now, the first day you ever decide to fry an egg, you can watch Gordon Ramsey and Jacques Pépin do it and watch your soul die with the realization that you'll never reach that level. Or you pick up a guitar, then go to YouTube and see some kid who's been practicing twelve hours a day since infancy and lose all hope.
A somewhat perverse trick to combat that is what I think of as low ceilings. If the thing you get into has some limit to how good you can be at it, then the difference between you and the world's best isn't so great that it kills your motivation. I'm an ex-game developer, and I've seen how many people really love PICO-8 and other deliberately constrained game making environments. I think a big part of that is because when you're making a PICO-8 game, you aren't comparing yourself to the world's best games, but just to the best PICO-8 games. Those can be surprisingly impressive too, but they don't feel so unattainably distant from your own first steps.
If you don't want to choose a medium that is instrinsically limited, another approach is to find a scene. Find a group of like-minded individuals at roughly the same skill level as you. Enough better than you to inspire you, but not so far that you don't feel you could ever reach their level. Immerse yourself in that group, an you'll naturally compare yourself to them and not the world at large.
Back when I used to be in a band, we played shows in small venues with other local bands. I knew we were never going to be the next Oasis or Tom Petty, but "Orlando's third-best rock band" was close enough within reach to be worth striving for, and it really helped keep me going.
I had the same experience except modding Motocross Madness and Carmageddon.
Carmageddon was especially easy to mod because it was all self-documented data files in .txt format [1] and you could mess with literally everything from graphics to physics.
The huge difference between this and now is that if I wanted to mess around with any kind of game I would need an IDE - which for a kid without a technical parent/mentor/friend would be a non-starter.
I've never heavily modded anything, but I made some mods for Skyrim and Fallout 4. In that case, the game engine is anticipating the extensions, so it's a bit easier. Add in community tools and it was stupid easy to do any sort of scripting alterations to a game. I can only imagine the complexity you have to grapple with when wading into a modern game not built to enable it.
Modding is definitely one of those things that has become harder. Often due to lack of availability but definitely in terms of skill level to get near a similar quality bar.
But at the same time it's never been easier to make a game from scratch in a whole host of different and easy to use engines.
> Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?
> A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
> And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.
> And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
That video is one of my favorites as it really hits home for me when I try to learn something new. You can know what makes something good, but you don't quite have the muscle memory or skill to reproduce it and it's frustrating.
You might know what a good painting looks like, but you can't move your arm in the right way to create those strokes. You don't know how to mix the paints to get the colors you want. When you are sketching out a scene, you're not quite adept at positioning elements of a scene on the page to have the aesthetics you're aiming for.
Another thing this reminds me of is learning how to dance. It's easy to watch someone walk through steps and mentally you know exactly how they are moving, but you just can't quite move your body in the same way. Super frustrating! What's worse is the first time you watch a video of you dancing. There's a huge disconnect between how you think you look and how you actually look and it's quite discouraging.
IMO this has little to do with “taste” and more to do with analytical/critical ability. The more experienced and knowledgeable you become in a creative endeavor, the easier it is to self-critique and (especially in visual art) see mistakes. When you’re starting out drawing for example, you literally can’t see your mistakes. You intuitively know it sucks but you don’t know exactly why. Figuring out that last part puts you on the road to mastery.
The rest is accurate though. It does take a lot of grit and working through lots and lots of bad stuff. Developing a creative talent can be a pretty horrible experience because of that ;P
It can be discouraging, even if you know this is true for so many people, though, to see the "young genius" types. They're exceptions to almost every rule by definition, but it can be hard to remember that when you see someone years or decades younger burst onto the scene and seem to eclipse what you can do with far less effort.
But yes, it's important to remember that even in fields with famous examples of luminaries like that, there are still countless other experts who practiced and practiced and continually got better to achieve their expertise out of willpower more than sheer transcendent prodigy.
> But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?
I've always told people interested in startup to "start a project, not a company." I haven't been able to verbalize why yet until this:
But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.
How can you know that such an impulse is part of some country’s national culture?
I sometimes think about what sets successful and less successful countries apart, and how profound an effect can cultures have. Assuming that smart people are born everywhere at similar rate, and disregarding unfree societies with authoritative regimes or paralysing religious dogmas, I would naively expect similar outcomes among countries. I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture, but I guess I will never know.
> Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem clever.
It's ~100x harder to create than critique. I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?" People will freely tell you the latter, but rarely the former.
> I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?"
A recurring thought I've had for years: the latter -- "why won't this work?" -- seems like a fairly common mindset for Eastern European engineers schooled in the 1960s. Brilliant people who need to understand everything to the bare essentials. And -- they produce strikingly simple solutions to almost every technical problem in the house.
Fairly often, though, this mindset seems to come with quite a complicated, uneasy personality.
My dad was a kind person, but I remember something he said about his civil engineering studies in the 1970s Soviet Union: for certain exams, not a single mistake was allowed. One wrong answer, and you failed. For if you build a house and miscalculate (e.g.) the needed strength of a crucial beam, you'll risk with fatalities.
I'm not an engineer, and I've always been in the "why might this work" boat myself. But I do understand this critical view precisely for that reason. For a lot of occupations, there is no unlimited Ctrl+Z.
That's my standard approach to work, I always try to invalidate an idea before investing my time (or the team's time) in it. If we can't invalidate the idea I feel much more confident that we're going in the right direction.
On the other hand a lot of people spend too much energy trying to support the idea, which often is a reflection of confirmation bias / wishful thinking in their thought process.
I think removing frictions from starting new things & automating the mundane things like project setup, doc setup etc. goes along way to cross the bridge from 'wanting to build something' to 'building it'.
Working in public on anything is very useful too as there is a long time inbetween making something and 'truly releasing' something. I remember the talk on how https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent started off as a simple readme. Got lots of interest & comments and only then was the idea validated and got built on, already with community.
"Many a-times, brilliant young people join an organisation and want to start right at the top or at a glamorous role. They get aggrieved when they are not given the shiny, glamorous role that commands respect or gives social proof. This tends to result in them doing a poor job of whatever role they have been given.
I posit that we can learn from the Tesla story described above. Take the job and prove yourself once an opportunity presents itself. It might not be what you envisioned last year before the pandemic and lockdown. It’s important to get into the door and then set the standards to where you believe you belong."
I think Tesla was right, but the attitude issue reflects on the individual's mindset (in addition to the focus issue he aptly described). Some people will do any job to the best of their ability, whether it's sweeping the floors or managing a company; others will continually lust after the more prestigious position, and never accomplish the tasks at hand.
> But the most conspicuous feature of Theranos's cap table is the absence of Silicon Valley firms. Journalists were fooled by Theranos, but Silicon Valley investors weren't.
Tim Draper was friends with Holmes's family and his kids grew up with hers. He invested personally, but I don't think his firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson did.
Theranos' fundraising was primarily from outside of SV: "Documents unsealed in a lawsuit brought against Theranos reveal a number of the high profile investors who had a stake in the nearly worthless start-up: The Waltons, founders of Walmart, with $150 million; Rupert Murdoch, with $125 million; and the DeVos family, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, with $100 million. The investments were made between 2013 and 2015, according to the Journal." - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/theranos-devos-other-investo...
DFJ put in $500,000. At their scale, that's chump change. They can safely invest that much money even in companies that are unlikely to succeed. And IIUC, Theranos wasn't a fraud at that point—there was still genuine hope that their product would work.
pg, and others pushing back against the Theranos-as-an-indictment-of-Silicon-Valley-venture-capital narrative, are talking about the firms that invested much larger sums after Elizabeth Holmes had gotten a lot of good press and become a hot commodity (and, in most cases, after she'd started engaging in fraud, unbeknownst to most). Those firms lost their shirts in a way that DFJ didn't.
The early stage of Theranos wasn't really a scam, they tried to build the actual product. The scam started when they failed to do so and then lied about it.
"It also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident."
You do not need to cultivate this personality trait in our culture. Far more people go too far with this than not far enough, myself included.
Overconfident people believe they know more than they actually do, so they are more eager to criticize your novel idea. This is the type of thinking Graham says he wants to avoid in earlier paragraphs.
Instead of cultivating overconfidence through the deadly sin of pride, we should cultivate increasing true confidence through the cardinal virtue of courage. You can build your confidence by taking greater and greater courageous action. Courage is the choice to confront pain, ridicule, and the unknown all for an uncertain reward.
Graham says, "being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own." Acting courageously does this much, much better. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if Graham agreed. The rest of the essay does a pretty good job explaining how to go about acting courageously, just without using the word.
> t also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident. I've noticed in many fields that the most successful people are slightly overconfident. On the face of it this seems implausible. Surely it would be optimal to have exactly the right estimate of one's abilities. How could it be an advantage to be mistaken? Because this error compensates for other sources of error in the opposite direction: being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own.
I disagree. Being overconfident compensates for the amount of luck you need to succeed. If 100 people are overconfident, and 5 of them succeed, it paid off for these 5 to be overconfident - because when you have that kind of luck, overconfidence is the appropriate level of confidence.
100 of 100 people are never overconfident (by definition). Overconfidence is infectious (because not everyone can vet every claim). Overconfident people are inherently predisposed to selection bias by others.
Humans naturally think linearly. This is because our lizard brains have evolved over millions of years in environment where linear processes were the most important to understand for survival. When we see a lion that is 1 mile away we know that we have 2x the time to run away than when the lion is .5 miles away.
So when we see a crappy project that took a few months to create, we naturally assume that it will be slightly less crappy in a few more months. We can't even imagine what it would look like if it was 100x more useful in 9 months. Even PG and other great early investors only have a slight notion of what that would look like.
There is creating new work and there is judging early work. One hack I’ve used for both is to realize that your brain is different at different times of day and in different levels of exhaustion/sleep/context etc. You are almost a different person as time passes. That novelty gives you new perspectives and new ideas with time. So always document new ideas (i have even built a new tool to make that as fast as possible) and then live with them for a bit. A good one will haunt you in that it will keep showing itself and resurfacing in other contexts. If the regret of not having it is heavier than the effort to put it together just use a weekend to put it together.
For judging ideas, you should pay even more attention to regrets. Your choice is a psychological anchor, so if you chose poorly you may not know it as your brain will automatically try to justify your choices, but if you find yourself angry at past rejections you’ve made on an idea, that’s probably regret talking to you, and that means you’ve been subconsciously haunted by something you should be paying more attention to.
Now I’ve learned to note what upsets me about an idea and at times dig in deeper and consider it extra points towards the idea.
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." -- Linus Torvalds on comp.os.minix in 1991
A couple of decades ago, I set forth to create something every day. It could be as simple as a bit of prose, writing some code, or as involved as a birdhouse. I haven't succeeded in creating every day since, but I did successfully create a habit of behavior that I cannot break. I've built games, websites, apps, written blogs, filed patents, built siege engines, been published, painted, carved wooden toys, remodeled houses, and much more. I've also started a couple of companies, one of which went through YCS17 and is still growing.
It's sad that there exists any cynicism around creation at all. Our ability to create might be the most human of our qualities. We literally make the world we live in.
The creations that excite me most are those that enable people to create even more. I really appreciate what PG is saying here, what he believes, and the dream factory that is YC.
I wonder if a good hack would be to think in terms of how I would react if a (my) child showed me something they made? Children are often doing something for the first time. I've noticed this breaks down my barriers to what I consider impressive.
Founders are in a similar situation, but since they're almost universally adults, we tend to apply adult prejudices to their work.
So much of the advice I see from YC (PG in this case, I know he isn't YC, but it's all cut from the same cloth) is about how to change your outer circumstances to accommodate inner impediments, such as Fear. They'll offer hacks or "mind games" to trick yourself into moving past the fear, as PG talks about here:
"But it's a bit strange that you have to play mind games with yourself to avoid being discouraged by lame-looking early efforts."
Unfortunately, I don't see anyone over there talking about conquering fear permanently, such that these issues fall away and what is left is boundless creativity.
One tool offered here is to "switch polarity", which means to take the other side of the argument. Fine, but real wisdom comes from transcending polarity.
Another tool offered is to tap into the motivation of curiosity. That's great as "early work" on the inner game, but there are much more robust ways to conquer fear when one looks at cutting edge work on consciousness evolution, such as Integral Dynamics, or studies Eastern traditions like Vajrayana or Zen.
I look forward to the day where YC elevates this discussion toward awakening themselves and their network to more transcendental tools.
One reason why I believe TikTok took off so fast is that they made it ok for videos to not be very good. They're not supposed to be overly polished and perfect. On Instagram, what you post is a reflection of you and how you want the world to see and judge you. TikTok is the opposite: videos are ephemeral, fun little things that you don't have to take seriously.
I think embarrassment really comes from writing code that you thought was great and then you look back at it and read it and it's too confident for it's own good. Learning is a gradual process–I'm almost never embarrassed by the code I wrote in the past, but that's not because that code is perfect; it's just that I made the best choices I could at the time, and made sure to know enough to identify what I didn't know back then. Embarrassment stems out of not knowing what you don't know and acting on that.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
I got put onto this quote/video by @garry here on HN, when he included it in his most recent YouTube video where he discusses how he made his channel grow & be successful. It's definitely something I've struggled with for a long time, and I wish I had found it sooner.
It's missing the bit where he explains that doing good work is in many fields (in precisely the ones that people are attracted to) is not enough to sustain yourself. You need to be super good or be lucky, have connections or some other form advantage.
[+] [-] GCA10|5 years ago|reply
The best innovators are really good at taking Version 1.0 and figuring out what rework will turn it into a better 2.0, and then 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, etc. This is an identifiable skill! It can be cultivated. Once you've got it, the failings of Version 1.0 do not ruin your self-esteem. You just get to work on fixing them. And not enough people think about this systematically.
One of my favorite museum stops of all time was the British Library, where a glass case held Paul McCartney's first draft of "Yesterday." You could see, cross-out by cross-out, how a somewhat awkward ballad got turned into a pop classic.
I'll submit that almost everything that looks like genius from a distance is a lot of step-by-step craft when viewed more closely. I did some consulting at Facebook in 2008 and it was quite amazing seeing how rapidly and incessantly Team Zuckerberg was not just adding features, but also rejiggering the way the feed worked; the layout, the everything.
Once you develop the ability to iterate your way to greatness, or at least to have a fighting chance of doing so, you're much more willing to crank out dodgy Version 1.0s and see what you (and your allies) can turn them into.
[+] [-] CerealFounder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago|reply
Yeah...but the other side of that depends on what the definition of “dodgy” is.
For example, say we have a server-based app. If the DB schema is badly-designed (usually overcomplicated), then we are truly pooched, as we’ll start to figure that out after we have a few thousand users.
If the DB design is OK, even if it is primitive and simple, then we can have naive, problematic code, yet plenty of room to grow.
I’ve learned to design for the unknown. It’s really paid off, for me, but YMMV.
[+] [-] hyperpallium2|5 years ago|reply
Also, Michelangelo did drafts and studies. So why can't I?
[+] [-] jasim|5 years ago|reply
Second is GitHub - the first few hundred commits of many successful open-source projects. It is a wonder to see sprawling codebases starting at its first commit, and plodding its way over years before gathering momentum.
[+] [-] mauriziocalo|5 years ago|reply
e.g.
Wayback machine:
- Airbnb (2008): https://web.archive.org/web/20080310025433/http://www.airbed...
- Uber (2010): https://web.archive.org/web/20101126114649/http://www.uberap...
- Twitter (2006): https://web.archive.org/web/20061127012643/http://twitter.co...
Show HN:
- Analytics.js / Segment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076
- Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
[+] [-] PeterisP|5 years ago|reply
You don't notice it if you're subscribing/following the comic, until you jump back to an earlier strip and see how much less skilled the early work was.
[+] [-] CrazyStat|5 years ago|reply
The creator stuck with it though and the quality improved dramatically and pretty quickly.
[1] https://www.philosophizethis.org/
[+] [-] njarboe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russnewcomer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|5 years ago|reply
This is an important and often overlooked aspect to creativity.
When people get into some thing, they naturally compare themselves to the people out there that are best at that thing. In Ye Olden days before the Internet and social media meant literally the world's best examples of every single thing were right at your fingertips, the "best" often meant "the best in your town" and the level of difference between your novice skill and that was not so great as to be disheartening.
But now, the first day you ever decide to fry an egg, you can watch Gordon Ramsey and Jacques Pépin do it and watch your soul die with the realization that you'll never reach that level. Or you pick up a guitar, then go to YouTube and see some kid who's been practicing twelve hours a day since infancy and lose all hope.
A somewhat perverse trick to combat that is what I think of as low ceilings. If the thing you get into has some limit to how good you can be at it, then the difference between you and the world's best isn't so great that it kills your motivation. I'm an ex-game developer, and I've seen how many people really love PICO-8 and other deliberately constrained game making environments. I think a big part of that is because when you're making a PICO-8 game, you aren't comparing yourself to the world's best games, but just to the best PICO-8 games. Those can be surprisingly impressive too, but they don't feel so unattainably distant from your own first steps.
If you don't want to choose a medium that is instrinsically limited, another approach is to find a scene. Find a group of like-minded individuals at roughly the same skill level as you. Enough better than you to inspire you, but not so far that you don't feel you could ever reach their level. Immerse yourself in that group, an you'll naturally compare yourself to them and not the world at large.
Back when I used to be in a band, we played shows in small venues with other local bands. I knew we were never going to be the next Oasis or Tom Petty, but "Orlando's third-best rock band" was close enough within reach to be worth striving for, and it really helped keep me going.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|5 years ago|reply
Carmageddon was especially easy to mod because it was all self-documented data files in .txt format [1] and you could mess with literally everything from graphics to physics.
The huge difference between this and now is that if I wanted to mess around with any kind of game I would need an IDE - which for a kid without a technical parent/mentor/friend would be a non-starter.
[1] https://carmageddon.fandom.com/wiki/Data_file
[+] [-] musingsole|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meheleventyone|5 years ago|reply
But at the same time it's never been easier to make a game from scratch in a whole host of different and easy to use engines.
[+] [-] jstanley|5 years ago|reply
> Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?
> A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
> And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.
> And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
[+] [-] allenu|5 years ago|reply
You might know what a good painting looks like, but you can't move your arm in the right way to create those strokes. You don't know how to mix the paints to get the colors you want. When you are sketching out a scene, you're not quite adept at positioning elements of a scene on the page to have the aesthetics you're aiming for.
Another thing this reminds me of is learning how to dance. It's easy to watch someone walk through steps and mentally you know exactly how they are moving, but you just can't quite move your body in the same way. Super frustrating! What's worse is the first time you watch a video of you dancing. There's a huge disconnect between how you think you look and how you actually look and it's quite discouraging.
[+] [-] pram|5 years ago|reply
The rest is accurate though. It does take a lot of grit and working through lots and lots of bad stuff. Developing a creative talent can be a pretty horrible experience because of that ;P
[+] [-] majormajor|5 years ago|reply
But yes, it's important to remember that even in fields with famous examples of luminaries like that, there are still countless other experts who practiced and practiced and continually got better to achieve their expertise out of willpower more than sheer transcendent prodigy.
[+] [-] pawannitj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boris|5 years ago|reply
"Talent is feeling how should not be."
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Hongwei|5 years ago|reply
But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.
[+] [-] povik|5 years ago|reply
I sometimes think about what sets successful and less successful countries apart, and how profound an effect can cultures have. Assuming that smart people are born everywhere at similar rate, and disregarding unfree societies with authoritative regimes or paralysing religious dogmas, I would naively expect similar outcomes among countries. I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture, but I guess I will never know.
[+] [-] curiousllama|5 years ago|reply
It's ~100x harder to create than critique. I find it's often much more important to ask "why might this work" than "why won't this work?" People will freely tell you the latter, but rarely the former.
[+] [-] marttt|5 years ago|reply
A recurring thought I've had for years: the latter -- "why won't this work?" -- seems like a fairly common mindset for Eastern European engineers schooled in the 1960s. Brilliant people who need to understand everything to the bare essentials. And -- they produce strikingly simple solutions to almost every technical problem in the house.
Fairly often, though, this mindset seems to come with quite a complicated, uneasy personality.
My dad was a kind person, but I remember something he said about his civil engineering studies in the 1970s Soviet Union: for certain exams, not a single mistake was allowed. One wrong answer, and you failed. For if you build a house and miscalculate (e.g.) the needed strength of a crucial beam, you'll risk with fatalities.
I'm not an engineer, and I've always been in the "why might this work" boat myself. But I do understand this critical view precisely for that reason. For a lot of occupations, there is no unlimited Ctrl+Z.
[+] [-] tcgv|5 years ago|reply
On the other hand a lot of people spend too much energy trying to support the idea, which often is a reflection of confirmation bias / wishful thinking in their thought process.
[+] [-] nikivi|5 years ago|reply
As well as ability to track things being worked on sorted by priority. I currently do that part in Notion. (https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/ideas)
Working in public on anything is very useful too as there is a long time inbetween making something and 'truly releasing' something. I remember the talk on how https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent started off as a simple readme. Got lots of interest & comments and only then was the idea validated and got built on, already with community.
Here is the great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqnvKP1DYRI
[+] [-] maverickJ|5 years ago|reply
"Many a-times, brilliant young people join an organisation and want to start right at the top or at a glamorous role. They get aggrieved when they are not given the shiny, glamorous role that commands respect or gives social proof. This tends to result in them doing a poor job of whatever role they have been given.
I posit that we can learn from the Tesla story described above. Take the job and prove yourself once an opportunity presents itself. It might not be what you envisioned last year before the pandemic and lockdown. It’s important to get into the door and then set the standards to where you believe you belong."
[+] [-] nickff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croissants|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] defen|5 years ago|reply
Not really a good defense of Silicon Valley, considering that Tim Draper was Theranos's first investor and a pretty big proponent of them https://twitter.com/RebeccaJarvis/status/974435962930548736
[+] [-] pchristensen|5 years ago|reply
Theranos' fundraising was primarily from outside of SV: "Documents unsealed in a lawsuit brought against Theranos reveal a number of the high profile investors who had a stake in the nearly worthless start-up: The Waltons, founders of Walmart, with $150 million; Rupert Murdoch, with $125 million; and the DeVos family, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, with $100 million. The investments were made between 2013 and 2015, according to the Journal." - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/theranos-devos-other-investo...
[+] [-] ameliaquining|5 years ago|reply
pg, and others pushing back against the Theranos-as-an-indictment-of-Silicon-Valley-venture-capital narrative, are talking about the firms that invested much larger sums after Elizabeth Holmes had gotten a lot of good press and become a hot commodity (and, in most cases, after she'd started engaging in fraud, unbeknownst to most). Those firms lost their shirts in a way that DFJ didn't.
[+] [-] sek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nilpunning|5 years ago|reply
You do not need to cultivate this personality trait in our culture. Far more people go too far with this than not far enough, myself included.
Overconfident people believe they know more than they actually do, so they are more eager to criticize your novel idea. This is the type of thinking Graham says he wants to avoid in earlier paragraphs.
Instead of cultivating overconfidence through the deadly sin of pride, we should cultivate increasing true confidence through the cardinal virtue of courage. You can build your confidence by taking greater and greater courageous action. Courage is the choice to confront pain, ridicule, and the unknown all for an uncertain reward.
Graham says, "being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own." Acting courageously does this much, much better. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if Graham agreed. The rest of the essay does a pretty good job explaining how to go about acting courageously, just without using the word.
[+] [-] underdeserver|5 years ago|reply
I disagree. Being overconfident compensates for the amount of luck you need to succeed. If 100 people are overconfident, and 5 of them succeed, it paid off for these 5 to be overconfident - because when you have that kind of luck, overconfidence is the appropriate level of confidence.
For an excellent demonstration of the importance of luck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I&vl=en
[+] [-] eyelidlessness|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bob33212|5 years ago|reply
So when we see a crappy project that took a few months to create, we naturally assume that it will be slightly less crappy in a few more months. We can't even imagine what it would look like if it was 100x more useful in 9 months. Even PG and other great early investors only have a slight notion of what that would look like.
[+] [-] dzink|5 years ago|reply
For judging ideas, you should pay even more attention to regrets. Your choice is a psychological anchor, so if you chose poorly you may not know it as your brain will automatically try to justify your choices, but if you find yourself angry at past rejections you’ve made on an idea, that’s probably regret talking to you, and that means you’ve been subconsciously haunted by something you should be paying more attention to.
Now I’ve learned to note what upsets me about an idea and at times dig in deeper and consider it extra points towards the idea.
[+] [-] staunch|5 years ago|reply
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." -- Linus Torvalds on comp.os.minix in 1991
[+] [-] markkat|5 years ago|reply
It's sad that there exists any cynicism around creation at all. Our ability to create might be the most human of our qualities. We literally make the world we live in.
The creations that excite me most are those that enable people to create even more. I really appreciate what PG is saying here, what he believes, and the dream factory that is YC.
[+] [-] redshirtrob|5 years ago|reply
Founders are in a similar situation, but since they're almost universally adults, we tend to apply adult prejudices to their work.
[+] [-] davebryand|5 years ago|reply
"But it's a bit strange that you have to play mind games with yourself to avoid being discouraged by lame-looking early efforts."
Unfortunately, I don't see anyone over there talking about conquering fear permanently, such that these issues fall away and what is left is boundless creativity.
One tool offered here is to "switch polarity", which means to take the other side of the argument. Fine, but real wisdom comes from transcending polarity.
Another tool offered is to tap into the motivation of curiosity. That's great as "early work" on the inner game, but there are much more robust ways to conquer fear when one looks at cutting edge work on consciousness evolution, such as Integral Dynamics, or studies Eastern traditions like Vajrayana or Zen.
I look forward to the day where YC elevates this discussion toward awakening themselves and their network to more transcendental tools.
[+] [-] thesausageking|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geocrasher|5 years ago|reply
Don't let little things like failure or poor quality stop you from trying. This is normal. Embrace it, learn, and keep doing things.
[+] [-] saagarjha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mizza|5 years ago|reply
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
[+] [-] blakesmith|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HorizonXP|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberdrunk|5 years ago|reply