> there is an important distinction between “working hard” and “maximising the number of hours during which one works”. In particular, forcing oneself to work even when one is tired, unmotivated, unprepared, or distracted with other tasks can end up being counterproductive to one’s long-term work productivity, and there is a saturation point beyond which pushing oneself to work even longer will actually reduce the total amount of work you get done in the long run
Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through.
Great point. I like to compare work capacity to exercise capacity. Too much exercise will actually harm your fitness rather than improve it. However, reasonable exertions, combined with appropriate rest, will improve your fitness over time.
Like exercise capacity, one's ability to work hard can also be improved through practice. This doesn't mean pulling all-nighters and chugging caffeine to override the sleepiness, though. It means setting incremental goals to try a little bit harder and then following up with proper rest and recovery.
For example, if you install time tracking software and measure that you spend 3 hours in your code editor every day (a reasonable amount for someone working an 8-hour day, due to time spent reading documentation, in meetings, and other activities), it would be a mistake to set a goal to spend 6 hours in your code editor. You'll get burned out and hate it.
However, if you set a goal to spend 3.5 hours in your code editor every day, you can likely find low-impact ways to make that happen. Maybe you're more efficient with transitioning from meetings back to coding. Or maybe you cut down time spent reading articles on HN or Twitter by 30 minutes and apply it to coding instead.
Over the course of a 5-day work week, that extra 30 minutes per day adds up to almost 3 hours extra work. If your starting point was 3 hours per day, you've basically added an extra work day to your week without giving up much.
I think there's an important point here too that cuts against a lot of memes: it's important to keep working hard right up until this point. A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a "work-a-holic." That's not a great mental model, if the work-a-holic is working more but not so much they are hitting these problems mentioned. There's a fairly wide margin between underwork and overwork.
edit: Lo and behold my sibling is taking on one of the memes I mentioned. :) If you're working less because you feel it's doing too much in the favor of your employer, and not because you're otherwise going to start becoming less productive because of it, you're probably underworking in the sense outlined here.
If there's anyone I'll listen respectfully to about the value of hard, diligent work, it's Terence Tao.
Reminds me of Richard Hamming talking about his professional envy of John Tukey:
One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!
TIL Bode, Hamming, Shannon, Tukey, et. al all worked at Bell Labs around the same time. Wonder what the culture must've been like, those are all household names in signal processing, control, information theory.
Off-topic, but why is it that Terry Tao's blog attracts such low-quality comments? When I look at SSC/ACX, Shtetl-Optimized, Marginal Revolution, etc. the comments are mostly constructive, engaged, and well-informed. With Tao, it's a huge proportion of random people asking for generic life advice, or fanboy-ism.
This seems counter-intuitive, because Tao's blog is by far the least accessible of those above 3 blogs on a technical level. There's almost no reason to visit Tao's blog if you don't have a graduate maths degree.
All blogs attract low-quality comments. Whether you see them is a function of how much effort is put into moderation. I'm just speculating, but Terry Tao probably has better things to do with his time.
Tao has gotten a lot more public media attention for the most part (Netflix, shows, TV, news, etc.) than any of the others which remain more niche. I'd guess as a result the audiences of the others are better selected to lean more high quality.
large foreign readership , so English is not a primary language. probably also a lot of spam comments that get through.
Those other sides also tend to have a fair share of low quality comments as well. A lot of troll bait or off topic stuff. I just don't read the comments, often I find that I am not missing out on much by not doing so.
It's probably good advice, and maybe my dissent is just due to my burn out, but...
I'm tired of hearing "work hard". Very often, working hard does not lead to success. It sure as shit didn't work out that way for me. There are many people who do not work hard and make tons of money in things like NFT, crypto, securities, office politics, scams, etc. It seems like luck is the shared variable... of which I have none.
> If you wake up in the morning full of vim and vigor, bounding out the door and into the world to take your shot, you didn't choose to be that way
Your coworkers that come into work early ready to crush through the workload in anticipation, and when the day is over, can't find the will to stop working, because frankly there is nothing outside their work that they are more passionate and excited about so they keep working. Well they are not finding it hard to do so, it's the opposite in fact, they'll find it hard to not work and do other things.
In your case, I think the conclusion is important as well:
> What if you've been unlucky in life? There should be consolation in the fact that studies show that what is important in the long run is not success so much as living a meaningful life. And that is the result of having family and friends, setting long-range goals, meeting challenges with courage and conviction, and being true to yourself.
Success is overated, and I've known people where success actually hid a deeper loss of enjoying life without self-judgement and constant comparison to others.
The way I look at it, luck is a very important variable, but it's one outside your control almost by definition, so it's not worth writing about how to change it.
So if you can't load the dice what can you do to get those high rolls? Well, maybe you can roll the dice more often (try more avenues, work harder), maybe the dice aren't all equal and you can observe many dice and pick the ones that happen to be paying out higher than you would expect if they were truly fair (market research), or something else.. I think people write about all those things not to claim that the dice rolls don't matter but because there are things that are both controllable and matter.
I agree with the burnout though, it can be hard to keep playing when you feel like a high roll is "due" but can't get one. I feel like some part of this is how we are wired, to solve the multi-armed bandit problems that life present us.
But what do I know, my rolls haven't been very high. I wish you luck in beating the burnout.
He also mentions setting realistic expectations. So, not "work hard to get rich" or "work hard to have a breakthrough scientific finding" (as there's too much involved there) but perhaps "work hard to be appreciated enough to make very good money" or "work hard so that I can make an non-trivial addition to my field of study" etc.
Also, if you're not really motivated by anything working hard can get you, then there's no point in hard work. Most people hate hard work and it's not worth it for them, hence they coast doing the minimum that doesn't get them fired. It's a perfectly valid life strategy, although the American religion of workoholism treats it as heresy (while millions of people practice it, feeling unnecessary guilt doing it).
His advice isn’t for how to get rich in crypto, it’s for how to succeed in academic mathematics. I can’t imagine that anyone has ever “lucked” their way into that.
Working hard for money, or even recognition, doesn’t always end well. The generalization of what he said from my perspective is that one should work hard to better themselves and do things they want to do, well.
It can be math, biology, coding, music, woodworking, anything. If you’re convinced that you’re quite good at what you’re doing and you only work 9-5 on your skills and projects, then it means you’re either developing crud apps, or you’re ignorant of what you actually don’t know. Again both are perfectly fine if that’s all you want from your career or hobby, but if it comes to questioning working hard in a generalized sense at the least you should preface it with your choices in this regard.
I don't really know if I believe in hard work. I feel more inclined to see things from the motivation school of thought. When you're motivated, all work is easy. The "hard" feeling comes from pushing through doing something you are not motivated to do.
And the thing is, I don't know if anyone is successful at that. I feel most success comes from people who had the motivation for it. Can you force yourself or others through work that they're not motivated to do and actually expect it to deliver on breakthroughs?
I'm fairly confident that when the article says "hard work", it just means "a lot of work". The article later mentions that more motivation will help you work harder.
The point is that motivated or not, high quality output requires a lot of work. Working a lot on a particular thing is still going to be easier for some and harder for others.
I actually believe the complete opposite. People who rely on motivation to get them through to the finish line in long term situations probably never make it there. Motivation is a very fleeting feeling unless you find something that utterly sets your soul on fire, and I would almost say it is a crutch for many. Sometimes you're going to get up in the morning and you're just going to have to push through. And there will almost always be small/medium/large pieces of work that are simply not fun(and you can't always delegate). The people who succeed will be the ones that have developed a mindset of resilience and just doing what needs to get done.
That’s exactly what Terry advices against. Not because you owe the company or anyone else that, but it’s possible you might regret not doing so yourself. My advisor described it as “being too smart for your own good.”
It's also a lot easier to work hard when you are handed access to every academic resource on the planet before you hit puberty. His life story is the most blatant counterexample to this article imaginable. Sounds like a case of deep denial.
Reading alone would take some serious hard work.
To make any meaningful contribution in any field you have to do some serious reading (and understanding) to bring yourself up to date with the field.
I've held for a long time that you must know the rules quite well before you're "allowed" to break them, and I think this reinforces my opinion on that.
Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It absolutely helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person who "works hard" is infinitely more valuable to their colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely on raw intellect.
My problem, and I wonder if others have this issue as well, is how hard it is to know these things intellectually, and also apply them to my life. I just cannot, for the life of me, maintain a "work hard" mindset. I'm still trying, but I very often fail at this, and its frustrating because I know how valuable it is to being good at what I do.
On a related note, this always trickles down to low level managers who then proceed to tell it to the floor workers.
Trying to motivate a cleaner, assembly operative, driver, cashier, warehouse operative, packer and other low level workers with it is like telling them to go fuck themselves.
It sounds like bullshit. It is bullshit. No one fucking loves these jobs. There's nothing to aspire to. Working hard means just killing yourself faster (but not fast enough).
To be honest, I don't see it as that different as a developer. None of my work makes the world a better place, and I work on products most people would see as essential and important. I want to be vague, but it's not like we make useless junk. The people pushing this garbage will be the ones seeing the benefits, I'll get a pat on the back if I'm lucking (and maybe like 1-3gs which will go right in my 401k)
Realistically, at mid-to-senior level, I've already seen all the significant changes to class that I will likely see. Hard work isn't even the main way to get ahead in the corporate world. Politics and social BS will have way more sway, and besides that, you just have to ensure that you don't have a reputation for incompetence (however exceptionalism is optional). Your mileage may vary, but in any case, hard work only gets you so far.
While I might be able to squeeze out an extra 10 or 20 grand here and there, salaries don't really go down, and it's not likely for that incremental improvement to have much of an effect. You know what will effect me though? Sacrificing the little personal time I do have.
It will only make me crazier and less healthy, by causing me to skip self-care and socialization. Something has to give, and I will not be seeing my friends, skip working out and cooking, or my house will be a disaster. I've done the math and 40 hours plus cooking/cleaning/exercise, basically yields 0 free hours, and whatever remains has to be use to relax or hang with friends.
It's just a bigger middle finger to the kind of low paying jobs you're talking about, because at least in engineering, you get a bigger payout for that sacrifice, and a chance of advancement. That's no small thing, and I'm not trying to say things are exactly the same, but it's not so different.
> Trying to motivate a cleaner, assembly operative, driver, cashier, warehouse operative, packer and other low level workers with it is like telling them to go fuck themselves.
This reads as true given how most jobs are currently organized/implemented. I don't think it has to be true though.
I used to work bagging groceries and pushing carts for a supermarket. I loved it. I worked quite hard and was recognized by customers for doing so. I personally enjoyed being able to help someone through great service.
Many of these jobs are naturally game-like (checkout the day before Thanksgiving = time trial). They are critical _essential_ positions.
These people probably don't love their jobs because they aren't treated as well as they should be. Realistically, bagging groceries is ~80-120% as hard as writing software (in terms of perceived effort); the software engineer shouldn't be making 5-20x more.
Making it clear that people are actually valued, by actually valuing them, makes a huge difference. Sadly, there are generations of MBAs who are allergic to the concept.
He is very specifically referring to putting in the work to achieve breakthroughs in graduate-level and higher mathematics here. No one in the that field is driving factory workers to actually produce the proof breakthroughs for them.
I used to work at a company where the janitor, by working hard, and being willing to step up to opportunities he was offered, became a shift supervisor. Not every company is like that, true, maybe almost none are, but it can happen. Reminds me of the concept "return on luck" to go along with "return on investment".
>"It is also important to direct your effort in a fruitful direction rather than a fruitless one"
This is actually the most critical sentence in the entire article.
I read an article somewhere, maybe 25 or 30 years ago, that was about this exact topic.
Some successful scientist, I don't even remember his name now, was asked about his success.
He said that others worked just as hard and diligently. But his skill was in selecting the projects that had a high degree of probability of success. He would watch others in his profession and see how they made horrible choices in the selection of their work. The unsuccessful people made a series of unwise choices. Tilting at windmills that had exceptionally poor chance of success, areas where there was no funding available or very difficult to get funding, and all sorts of other problems.
The same thing is true with everything. For example, lots of people start businesses that are shitty selection right off the bat - they have almost zero chance of success before they even begin. All teh perfect execution and hard work will be for naught. The founder has blinders on.
You always hear about the successes. People always say false things like, the idea is 1%, execution is 99% of it. Not true. It's more like, the idea is worth 99%, and the execution is the other 99% of success. Trust me, I've seen a LOT of great execution on shit ideas and the company goes down the drain. You just never hear of them. And by the way, this is in regards to ideas that are actually have a corporation started around them, as opposed to just aimlessly talking about ideas.
Anyways, take what you will from what I just wrote.
[+] [-] herodoturtle|4 years ago|reply
Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
Like exercise capacity, one's ability to work hard can also be improved through practice. This doesn't mean pulling all-nighters and chugging caffeine to override the sleepiness, though. It means setting incremental goals to try a little bit harder and then following up with proper rest and recovery.
For example, if you install time tracking software and measure that you spend 3 hours in your code editor every day (a reasonable amount for someone working an 8-hour day, due to time spent reading documentation, in meetings, and other activities), it would be a mistake to set a goal to spend 6 hours in your code editor. You'll get burned out and hate it.
However, if you set a goal to spend 3.5 hours in your code editor every day, you can likely find low-impact ways to make that happen. Maybe you're more efficient with transitioning from meetings back to coding. Or maybe you cut down time spent reading articles on HN or Twitter by 30 minutes and apply it to coding instead.
Over the course of a 5-day work week, that extra 30 minutes per day adds up to almost 3 hours extra work. If your starting point was 3 hours per day, you've basically added an extra work day to your week without giving up much.
[+] [-] gfodor|4 years ago|reply
edit: Lo and behold my sibling is taking on one of the memes I mentioned. :) If you're working less because you feel it's doing too much in the favor of your employer, and not because you're otherwise going to start becoming less productive because of it, you're probably underworking in the sense outlined here.
[+] [-] cushychicken|4 years ago|reply
Reminds me of Richard Hamming talking about his professional envy of John Tukey:
One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!
From "You and Your Research": https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
[+] [-] TrackerFF|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZephyrBlu|4 years ago|reply
Why? He is a genius, and most of us aren't geniuses.
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snakeboy|4 years ago|reply
This seems counter-intuitive, because Tao's blog is by far the least accessible of those above 3 blogs on a technical level. There's almost no reason to visit Tao's blog if you don't have a graduate maths degree.
[+] [-] fighterpilot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|4 years ago|reply
There are constructive, well-informed comments on Marginal Revolution, but I wouldn't call them the majority...
[+] [-] jonas21|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonehome|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
Those other sides also tend to have a fair share of low quality comments as well. A lot of troll bait or off topic stuff. I just don't read the comments, often I find that I am not missing out on much by not doing so.
[+] [-] drenvuk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] john5smith|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] giantg2|4 years ago|reply
I'm tired of hearing "work hard". Very often, working hard does not lead to success. It sure as shit didn't work out that way for me. There are many people who do not work hard and make tons of money in things like NFT, crypto, securities, office politics, scams, etc. It seems like luck is the shared variable... of which I have none.
[+] [-] didibus|4 years ago|reply
It's been a while since I looked into it, but last time I checked, I couldn't find any evidence behind "hard work".
This article kind of sums it up: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-success-come...
> If you wake up in the morning full of vim and vigor, bounding out the door and into the world to take your shot, you didn't choose to be that way
Your coworkers that come into work early ready to crush through the workload in anticipation, and when the day is over, can't find the will to stop working, because frankly there is nothing outside their work that they are more passionate and excited about so they keep working. Well they are not finding it hard to do so, it's the opposite in fact, they'll find it hard to not work and do other things.
In your case, I think the conclusion is important as well:
> What if you've been unlucky in life? There should be consolation in the fact that studies show that what is important in the long run is not success so much as living a meaningful life. And that is the result of having family and friends, setting long-range goals, meeting challenges with courage and conviction, and being true to yourself.
Success is overated, and I've known people where success actually hid a deeper loss of enjoying life without self-judgement and constant comparison to others.
[+] [-] mattnewton|4 years ago|reply
So if you can't load the dice what can you do to get those high rolls? Well, maybe you can roll the dice more often (try more avenues, work harder), maybe the dice aren't all equal and you can observe many dice and pick the ones that happen to be paying out higher than you would expect if they were truly fair (market research), or something else.. I think people write about all those things not to claim that the dice rolls don't matter but because there are things that are both controllable and matter.
I agree with the burnout though, it can be hard to keep playing when you feel like a high roll is "due" but can't get one. I feel like some part of this is how we are wired, to solve the multi-armed bandit problems that life present us.
But what do I know, my rolls haven't been very high. I wish you luck in beating the burnout.
[+] [-] burntoutfire|4 years ago|reply
Also, if you're not really motivated by anything working hard can get you, then there's no point in hard work. Most people hate hard work and it's not worth it for them, hence they coast doing the minimum that doesn't get them fired. It's a perfectly valid life strategy, although the American religion of workoholism treats it as heresy (while millions of people practice it, feeling unnecessary guilt doing it).
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramraj07|4 years ago|reply
It can be math, biology, coding, music, woodworking, anything. If you’re convinced that you’re quite good at what you’re doing and you only work 9-5 on your skills and projects, then it means you’re either developing crud apps, or you’re ignorant of what you actually don’t know. Again both are perfectly fine if that’s all you want from your career or hobby, but if it comes to questioning working hard in a generalized sense at the least you should preface it with your choices in this regard.
[+] [-] P_I_Staker|4 years ago|reply
- Everyone in the USA
[+] [-] golemiprague|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] didibus|4 years ago|reply
And the thing is, I don't know if anyone is successful at that. I feel most success comes from people who had the motivation for it. Can you force yourself or others through work that they're not motivated to do and actually expect it to deliver on breakthroughs?
[+] [-] themacguffinman|4 years ago|reply
The point is that motivated or not, high quality output requires a lot of work. Working a lot on a particular thing is still going to be easier for some and harder for others.
[+] [-] mym1990|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisweekly|4 years ago|reply
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4690
[+] [-] keithalewis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramraj07|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brailsafe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] courtf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unholiness|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
Worth the watch (IMNSHO). It's very short, and very encouraging.
[0] https://vimeo.com/85040589
[+] [-] jarenmf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OtomotO|4 years ago|reply
I don't define myself or my self worth solely via the work I do.
Always. But then again, in my culture it's not as extreme as in other parts of the world.
[+] [-] tacojimjennings|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beny23|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] david_allison|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TameAntelope|4 years ago|reply
Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It absolutely helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person who "works hard" is infinitely more valuable to their colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely on raw intellect.
My problem, and I wonder if others have this issue as well, is how hard it is to know these things intellectually, and also apply them to my life. I just cannot, for the life of me, maintain a "work hard" mindset. I'm still trying, but I very often fail at this, and its frustrating because I know how valuable it is to being good at what I do.
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
Trying to motivate a cleaner, assembly operative, driver, cashier, warehouse operative, packer and other low level workers with it is like telling them to go fuck themselves.
It sounds like bullshit. It is bullshit. No one fucking loves these jobs. There's nothing to aspire to. Working hard means just killing yourself faster (but not fast enough).
[+] [-] hellbannedguy|4 years ago|reply
The rich have been telling the poor how to live their lives forever.
Jesus being the exception. (He wasen't rich)
I only get offended by wealthy boys giving their midlife, or old age, success speech
Or, thinking they can advise on art, philosophy, or writing, because they have a mouthpiece.
Every one of them leaves out the emphatic wealthy father who knows how difficult it is to make it big in a very competitstive system.
[+] [-] P_I_Staker|4 years ago|reply
Realistically, at mid-to-senior level, I've already seen all the significant changes to class that I will likely see. Hard work isn't even the main way to get ahead in the corporate world. Politics and social BS will have way more sway, and besides that, you just have to ensure that you don't have a reputation for incompetence (however exceptionalism is optional). Your mileage may vary, but in any case, hard work only gets you so far.
While I might be able to squeeze out an extra 10 or 20 grand here and there, salaries don't really go down, and it's not likely for that incremental improvement to have much of an effect. You know what will effect me though? Sacrificing the little personal time I do have.
It will only make me crazier and less healthy, by causing me to skip self-care and socialization. Something has to give, and I will not be seeing my friends, skip working out and cooking, or my house will be a disaster. I've done the math and 40 hours plus cooking/cleaning/exercise, basically yields 0 free hours, and whatever remains has to be use to relax or hang with friends.
It's just a bigger middle finger to the kind of low paying jobs you're talking about, because at least in engineering, you get a bigger payout for that sacrifice, and a chance of advancement. That's no small thing, and I'm not trying to say things are exactly the same, but it's not so different.
[+] [-] n8cpdx|4 years ago|reply
This reads as true given how most jobs are currently organized/implemented. I don't think it has to be true though.
I used to work bagging groceries and pushing carts for a supermarket. I loved it. I worked quite hard and was recognized by customers for doing so. I personally enjoyed being able to help someone through great service.
Many of these jobs are naturally game-like (checkout the day before Thanksgiving = time trial). They are critical _essential_ positions.
These people probably don't love their jobs because they aren't treated as well as they should be. Realistically, bagging groceries is ~80-120% as hard as writing software (in terms of perceived effort); the software engineer shouldn't be making 5-20x more.
Making it clear that people are actually valued, by actually valuing them, makes a huge difference. Sadly, there are generations of MBAs who are allergic to the concept.
[+] [-] nonameiguess|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaysonL|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] France_is_bacon|4 years ago|reply
This is actually the most critical sentence in the entire article.
I read an article somewhere, maybe 25 or 30 years ago, that was about this exact topic.
Some successful scientist, I don't even remember his name now, was asked about his success.
He said that others worked just as hard and diligently. But his skill was in selecting the projects that had a high degree of probability of success. He would watch others in his profession and see how they made horrible choices in the selection of their work. The unsuccessful people made a series of unwise choices. Tilting at windmills that had exceptionally poor chance of success, areas where there was no funding available or very difficult to get funding, and all sorts of other problems.
The same thing is true with everything. For example, lots of people start businesses that are shitty selection right off the bat - they have almost zero chance of success before they even begin. All teh perfect execution and hard work will be for naught. The founder has blinders on.
You always hear about the successes. People always say false things like, the idea is 1%, execution is 99% of it. Not true. It's more like, the idea is worth 99%, and the execution is the other 99% of success. Trust me, I've seen a LOT of great execution on shit ideas and the company goes down the drain. You just never hear of them. And by the way, this is in regards to ideas that are actually have a corporation started around them, as opposed to just aimlessly talking about ideas.
Anyways, take what you will from what I just wrote.