The anecdotes here could be used to justify a range of different theories:
'Being Daring is the Secret Ingredient for Success';
'Innovation is the Secret Ingredient for Success';
'Not Giving Up is the Secret Ingredient for Success'
'Giving People What They Don't Know They Want is the Secret Ingredient for Success'
and so on... Can I have my book deal now?
EDIT: I'd also like to use this opportunity to invent the new verb "to Gladwell", which is to make up a spurious set of keys to success using the flimsiest of anecdotes. Hence my next book - 'Learning How to Gladwell is the Secret Ingredient for Success'
"Q: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?
"A: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke them."
is good, while trying out ideas, at crediting his sources. Any reader of a Malcolm Gladwell book (as I know, from being a reader of the book Outliers) can check the sources, and decide from there what other sources to check and what other ideas to play with. Gladwell doesn't purport to write textbooks, but I give him a lot of credit for finding interesting scholarly sources that haven't had enough attention in the popular literature. He is equaled by very few authors as a story-teller who can tie ideas together in a thought-provoking assembly.
"The successful people we spoke with — in business, entertainment, sports and the arts — all had similar responses when faced with obstacles: they subjected themselves to fairly merciless self-examination that prompted reinvention of their goals and the methods by which they endeavored to acheive them."
100% of successful people subjected themselves to merciless self-examination? A 100% result usually indicates a small sample size or a meaningless conclusion. Nor is this a particularly useful fact without knowing what % of unsuccessful people self-examine themselves constantly.
It's hard to knock the article's premise though, even if the author has provided little evidence to support it: Frequent self-examination seems like a good thing.
I believe that honest and accurate self-examination is easier said than done, though.
The article seemed to be referring to dramatic moments of self-assessment when people fundamentally transformed themselves or their businesses. In a startup, I would think that you typically do this many times before finding the winning formula. Does anyone have insight into how often it is practical and useful to do a dramatic re-imagining of the fundamentals of your business? I'm guessing there is such a thing as pivoting too much or too often.
Certainly, I think it is important to practice self-awareness and self-assessment on a daily basis, but there are no shortage of good ideas on a strong startup team. Every few days someone has a great new idea that could be transformative, and from my experience, you try to question yourselves and your assumptions all the time (hopefully in as brutally honest a way as is necessary, though you sometimes wonder if you are fooling yourselves). Perhaps reality is simply more incremental, though it can look dramatic and transformative after the fact. Every sprint planning meeting and every board meeting is an opportunity for rigorous assessment. You just have to work hard to maintain self-awareness, to see things from a truly unique perspective and make big changes when necessary. Outside advisers certainly help. Otherwise, we are human after all, and it is easy to fool ourselves.
Talking about startups, does this just mean keeping your eyes on your numbers and doing frequent review or are we talking about something on a more personal level?
This is something that I've struggled with my entire life - how to be honest with myself about what my shortcomings are and how to overcome them.
For me at least, it's been incredibly difficult and at times impossible. I've come to believe that there is something deeply rooted inside the human psyche that refuses to completely accept that we are imperfect.
Of course this isn't always unwanted. If we didn't have a certain amount of pure egotistical madness, how else would we attempt our dreams? The real trick is to figure out what parts you'll have to have help with in order to get there instead of blindly believing we can do it all.
This is probably why YC is so fixated on funding partners. You need someone with a very high level of self-awareness to be able to tackle the challenge on their own. I suspect that those individuals are fairly rare.
If it were just about building and doing things in a social vacuum, and you can accept the risks of what you're doing without becoming paralyzed, there should be no real downside to having a completely realistic feeling for your own limits.
Here is the problem. In our business culture, if you are pitching to sell products, get funding or get hired, then you can't export the products of your realistic introspection. This is not effective. No one wants to hear it. And you will be despised: if you say tepid things about yourself, people will imagine even worse about you, and your competitors will easily make use of this. So whether you are delusional about yourself or not, you have to export a delusionally rosy picture of who you are and what you are doing.
If we want to stop incentivizing this, we can. But we don't.
> something deeply rooted inside the human psyche that refuses to completely accept that we are imperfect
I'm an atheist, but I've always been struck by how almost all successful human societies have an idea of god(s). I think it must confer some benefit. One of those benefits is a receptacle/personification for all the things we don't know/can't do - and a handle for all our ideals realised. Hence, the possibility of humility, not to another human "alpha male", but to something that, as mortals, we simply can't compete with. So the greeks had all these tragedies about hubris and nemesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubrishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(mythology)
Perhaps having a "god" as a label is psychologically easier to grasp than the nebulous and infinite "unknown".
Tenacity and study are certainly important in achieving your goals, but self-examination is crucial in determining if those goals are indeed worthwhile.
I started meditating consistently a few months ago, and it has led to some huge breakthroughs for myself. I can't recommend meditation enough as a way to take a step back from the hurried need to do something, and to really think deeply on every aspect of your approach.
Shameless self promotion:
I was measuring my meditation with an Arduino for the first 3 months and built a meditation app to help people get started meditating. If you have a Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor, the app also tracks your heart rate variance to let you know when you've entered a meditative state.
"People who are right a lot often change their minds"--Jeff Bezos
It seems this is a corollary of the principle of self examination.
There's certainly some personality trait (e.g. intelligence/experience) that's more fundamental than a propensity for self examination. Not sure what it is...but it's the difference between knowing when to stick to something and knowing when to draw the opposite conclusions from your self-examination.
The world is full of successful narcissists and psychopaths. Not the most introspective types, so how do they do it? A better predictor for successfulness is how successful your parents was. That is the only theory I know of that can explain how George W Bush became president.
Ray Dalio, the founder of the investment firm Bridgewater Associates includes self-examination, honesty and introspection as one of the key ingredients in getting what you want from life.
I take the article as another datapoint to support his theory.
If you're already stopping to think what you're doing wrong, you're probably already on the right track, and this article might be a bit basic for you :)
Some people can be surprisingly unwilling to even imagine that they're doing anything wrong at all. They routinely assume that difficulties they encounter are the product of external factors, and never stop to even wonder whether the cause is their own sub-optimal decisions.
It's more subtle than that. You need to know _why_ you're doing things wrong - what's motivating you, what's preventing you from improving, what conceptions (or misconceptions) you have.
As pg said, having self-awareness isn't necessarily a recipe for success, but a lot of failures come from a refusal to see the reality of the path you're on.
[+] [-] hnhg|13 years ago|reply
'Being Daring is the Secret Ingredient for Success'; 'Innovation is the Secret Ingredient for Success'; 'Not Giving Up is the Secret Ingredient for Success' 'Giving People What They Don't Know They Want is the Secret Ingredient for Success'
and so on... Can I have my book deal now?
EDIT: I'd also like to use this opportunity to invent the new verb "to Gladwell", which is to make up a spurious set of keys to success using the flimsiest of anecdotes. Hence my next book - 'Learning How to Gladwell is the Secret Ingredient for Success'
[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html
"Q: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?
"A: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke them."
is good, while trying out ideas, at crediting his sources. Any reader of a Malcolm Gladwell book (as I know, from being a reader of the book Outliers) can check the sources, and decide from there what other sources to check and what other ideas to play with. Gladwell doesn't purport to write textbooks, but I give him a lot of credit for finding interesting scholarly sources that haven't had enough attention in the popular literature. He is equaled by very few authors as a story-teller who can tie ideas together in a thought-provoking assembly.
[+] [-] the_economist|13 years ago|reply
"The successful people we spoke with — in business, entertainment, sports and the arts — all had similar responses when faced with obstacles: they subjected themselves to fairly merciless self-examination that prompted reinvention of their goals and the methods by which they endeavored to acheive them."
100% of successful people subjected themselves to merciless self-examination? A 100% result usually indicates a small sample size or a meaningless conclusion. Nor is this a particularly useful fact without knowing what % of unsuccessful people self-examine themselves constantly.
It's hard to knock the article's premise though, even if the author has provided little evidence to support it: Frequent self-examination seems like a good thing.
I believe that honest and accurate self-examination is easier said than done, though.
[+] [-] jamesbritt|13 years ago|reply
Too late: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3044462
[+] [-] pg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvo|13 years ago|reply
Certainly, I think it is important to practice self-awareness and self-assessment on a daily basis, but there are no shortage of good ideas on a strong startup team. Every few days someone has a great new idea that could be transformative, and from my experience, you try to question yourselves and your assumptions all the time (hopefully in as brutally honest a way as is necessary, though you sometimes wonder if you are fooling yourselves). Perhaps reality is simply more incremental, though it can look dramatic and transformative after the fact. Every sprint planning meeting and every board meeting is an opportunity for rigorous assessment. You just have to work hard to maintain self-awareness, to see things from a truly unique perspective and make big changes when necessary. Outside advisers certainly help. Otherwise, we are human after all, and it is easy to fool ourselves.
[+] [-] asdfologist|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudhirj|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathanstitt|13 years ago|reply
For me at least, it's been incredibly difficult and at times impossible. I've come to believe that there is something deeply rooted inside the human psyche that refuses to completely accept that we are imperfect.
Of course this isn't always unwanted. If we didn't have a certain amount of pure egotistical madness, how else would we attempt our dreams? The real trick is to figure out what parts you'll have to have help with in order to get there instead of blindly believing we can do it all.
This is probably why YC is so fixated on funding partners. You need someone with a very high level of self-awareness to be able to tackle the challenge on their own. I suspect that those individuals are fairly rare.
[+] [-] pekk|13 years ago|reply
Here is the problem. In our business culture, if you are pitching to sell products, get funding or get hired, then you can't export the products of your realistic introspection. This is not effective. No one wants to hear it. And you will be despised: if you say tepid things about yourself, people will imagine even worse about you, and your competitors will easily make use of this. So whether you are delusional about yourself or not, you have to export a delusionally rosy picture of who you are and what you are doing.
If we want to stop incentivizing this, we can. But we don't.
[+] [-] 6ren|13 years ago|reply
I'm an atheist, but I've always been struck by how almost all successful human societies have an idea of god(s). I think it must confer some benefit. One of those benefits is a receptacle/personification for all the things we don't know/can't do - and a handle for all our ideals realised. Hence, the possibility of humility, not to another human "alpha male", but to something that, as mortals, we simply can't compete with. So the greeks had all these tragedies about hubris and nemesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(mythology)
Perhaps having a "god" as a label is psychologically easier to grasp than the nebulous and infinite "unknown".
[+] [-] gnosis|13 years ago|reply
"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur
"Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly." -- Alexander Hamilton
"What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it." -- Doris Lessing
[+] [-] jackalope|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakeonthemove|13 years ago|reply
Most people don't want to face their shortcomings, but of those who do, even fewer actually take the action necessary for success...
[+] [-] burningion|13 years ago|reply
Shameless self promotion:
I was measuring my meditation with an Arduino for the first 3 months and built a meditation app to help people get started meditating. If you have a Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor, the app also tracks your heart rate variance to let you know when you've entered a meditative state.
buddhamindapp.com
[+] [-] levlandau|13 years ago|reply
There's certainly some personality trait (e.g. intelligence/experience) that's more fundamental than a propensity for self examination. Not sure what it is...but it's the difference between knowing when to stick to something and knowing when to draw the opposite conclusions from your self-examination.
[+] [-] bjourne|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yorak|13 years ago|reply
I take the article as another datapoint to support his theory.
A good read: http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdfologist|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] to3m|13 years ago|reply
Some people can be surprisingly unwilling to even imagine that they're doing anything wrong at all. They routinely assume that difficulties they encounter are the product of external factors, and never stop to even wonder whether the cause is their own sub-optimal decisions.
[+] [-] nlh|13 years ago|reply
As pg said, having self-awareness isn't necessarily a recipe for success, but a lot of failures come from a refusal to see the reality of the path you're on.
[+] [-] darec1|13 years ago|reply