Bah. Don't fall for this kind of bullshit manipulation.

> [0] (I prefer not to name them, lest I be disregarded as a fanboy, but the clues are in the comment)

Cite your sources mate. If they had such a profound affect on you, surely you can link to something they've said or written as an example.

But I'll bite: is it Eliezer Yudkowsky and Warren Buffett? Elon Musk and Steve Jobs? I want to get progressively more psychotic and unhinged as my guesses progress. Is it Slavoj Žižek and Donald Trump?

Paul Graham and Richard Stallman?

I don't believe in personalities. Wisdom is perishable.

Paul Graham, Elon Musk.

Buffett qualifies, not Jobs.

It's not about personalities, take them or leave them. It's the way they convey their thinking when solving problems. YMMV.

Couldn’t you have just said their names in the first instance?

Are you now also going to point us to some examples of why you think these two are good candidates?

I don't have time to find the better examples, but this is one Musk has talked about for many years:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/18/why-elon-musk-wants-his-empl...

What's interesting, and I didn't know this until I scanned this article, is that Reed Hastings also uses a First Principles approach. I mentioned my stock picks got better. I bought TSLA in 2012 and NFLX in 2013.

For Paul Graham, his body of essays is a great source for how he thinks through problem solving in general, and he takes on more than just science or tech related topics:

http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

Since you mentioned Warren Buffet, any of his annual shareholder letters is a good source:

https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

He's a sample from 2009:

"From the start, Charlie and I have believed in having a rational and unbending standard for measuring what we have – or have not – accomplished. That keeps us from the temptation of seeing where the arrow of performance lands and then painting the bull’s eye around it."

Huge fan of Elon and Warren buffet. But I always wonder would they be who they are by lurking on HN trying to improve themselves? And they certainly didn’t get where they are by being on hn or similar forums. Even thought I don’t know them personally I feel The way they built their knowledge was in Avery different way thst you and I might be going about based on the click baity thread we are talking at currently. In that sense may be HN is a waste of time too?

The more I think about this the more I feel is thst we have it wrong. I think what they have is focus. I think what we have is distractions by virtue of seeking things thst improves us and on the internet there are so many of them that one may be all over the place. He who chases two rabbits catches none.

I see it a bit differently. Some people get on a cycle of taking action, reviewing the results, and learning to improve the results of their next action. All three of those I cited have that in their DNA (or so it seems to me). Learning from others is a key aspect of that approach. In reviewing the results, and even before taking the action, search for how others have approached the same problem. Not necessarily to copy them, but to identify what worked and adopt it, what didn't work and avoid it, then, synthesize and move forward to the next challenge.

A Musk quote that stuck with me came in the midst of one of his Twitter escapades wherein he was regularly attacked for seemingly erratic, likely sleep-deprived statements. He came across as very defensive to a reporter who asked him if he felt he could accept criticism. He responded, "How do you think rockets get into space?" He may not be so concerned about how Wall Street perceives his character, but when it comes to SpaceX, and likely all of his serious endeavors, he's relentlessly critical of solutions.

Hacker News is just one source to get ideas, learn new things and practice rational thinking. Folks around here are more than happy to help hone your skills. If you can carry that into daily life, you'll catch a rabbit or two.

I agree with what you say and perhaps what I am trying to say ineloquently is they have focus on what they want to do first and when they need a solution they go searching for it leveraging what others have done and reviewing it etc. I can’t speak for you but I am a regular visitor to hn and the content it shows and in that sense I am here first looking for ways to improve and then hoping to apply what I have learned to something when it’s needed and may be it will never be needed. Former is focused to unfocus as needed and latter is unfocused to focus someday. If that makes sense.

I tend to believe people have some sort of predisposed propensity to succeed, for whether definition of succeed we like to use, for whatever type of endeavour we’re pursuing.

Combine that with the genetic lotto—born in the right place at the right time in to the right family—and a fairly random dose of luck—right idea at the right time.

And there’s a statistical side to it too: only about one in one hundred people can be in to top 1%, and the Musks / Buffets / Grahams of the day world are more rare still.

The internet barely existed when they were growing up. Why would they be lurking on forums?

They did what they had to do for the realities of their time.

Ha! That’s a great observation!

One could write numerous contentless blog posts about how they did or didn’t contribute to their success.

Thank you for the more comprehensive response.