It is even worse.

This article is (yet another) attemp to romanticize and put to pedestal 'startup with a novel idea'. It is worth to mention that trying to trick/persuade/convince (choose freely) thousands (literaly) of people to go this path, benefits tremendously ycombinator - not the persuaded founders. Because for YC if only few are (hugely) successfull they win. Not so for the other thousands. The fact that few means 200 here, does not change that 'other' means around dozens of thousands.

Startups with 'right but not novel' are also GOOD. But they are muuuuch worse for YC. YC is not seeking all investments to end with modest returns. YC is seeking few, but with HUGE returns.

Pay attention also, that ycombinator itself is in the 'right, but not inventive' camp. It's like 'selling investing advices', while in the same time, author makes money on sth completly different (advices :). BAD ADVICES, to be exact.

p.s. I'm also tired on romanticizing airbnb in literally 3 paragraph (search for airbeds if you missed it). This is a pattern.

I agree with you entirely. To add to your point, we readers aren’t an an average of a simulation. We are a single path. So, this advice works for the those that reap benefits of the average but it may not be the advice suited for individuals.

“Jump off a cliff because statistically, one of you may fly”.

"We've had no complaints from cliff jumping participants."

a literal example of survivor bias

Money has logarithmic utility. If you build a successful company, your gain is proportional to logarithm of its profit. But your investor's gain is directly proportional to the profit.

So the investor will try to convince you to aim for 300% profit with 50% probability (compared to your original plan), because for the investor this simply means +50%. For you, it mostly means -50% probability, because the difference between having e.g. $10M or $30M is negligible compared to the difference between having $10M or nothing.

But what is the problem for those for who it doesn't work? How much do they get to lose? If they don't get accepted to the YC, they lose very little and it's just a short detour in their lives, certainly not the most boring or frustrating one, something to remember. If they get accepted to the YC, they clearly win vs the average folk because they get to know so many influential people and see how the world-class stuff gets done.

For example, i've been doing custom development for more than 20 years, made several million in the process, built over 130 project and i still don't have a slightest idea of how it's done - because every single of my client's projects failed - and i would be more than delighted to see how projects succeed first-hand even if the project wasn't mine.

I feel your example is a good portrayal of a life pretty much well-lived: you made money doing something you enjoy, met tons of people and fed your curiosity.

But according to this essay, you followed a BAD path not innovative enough, and the hidden reason why it's bad is because it will never generate any sort of profit for YC.

Now if you had tried 3 or 4 startups in that same timespan, burned through all your life savings, did not make several millions in the process, and failed all you endeavours, you will be applauded by YC.

Why ? because the more people exist like you, the better it is for them.

> you followed a BAD path [ according to the essay]

I think not -- instead this seems quite un-conventional to me:

>> doing custom development for more than 20 years, made several million in the process

> detour in their lives, certainly not the most boring or frustrating one, something to remember

Yes, and something one could regret for a lifetime if one never tried, a dream that one never gave the chance

But of course it depends

> trying to trick/persuade/convince (choose freely) thousands (literaly) of people to go this path, benefits tremendously ycombinator - not the persuaded founders.

Why so negative

It can be fun for the founders also if the startup fails, and not always anything to regret

And good for society in general with more innovation, eg YC's request for startups page: https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

Many things there are really good for this planet

At this point, honestly the only YC startup they seem to be romanticizing is Airbnb. I've only heard of a few casual mentions (from Michael Siebel I think) of Brex or Segment or any of the other startups.

It does appear that YC is no longer relevant the way they were 10 years ago.

Is there a "new" YC?

Largely, successful people have little idea what they did to succeed at something. I observed this first in others and then in myself when trying to teach others.

One reason is - like PG says - the inclination for activities is more nature vs nurture than we like to think. We want the success to be caused by our choices and intelect. When it was largely chosen for us at birth.

Another aspect is post fact rationalization. Again like he says the unconscious mind decides first. Then the rational part tries to explain the choice but it often fails even to identify it, let alone pinpoint the reasons for it.

Third: teaching is mostly done through example and practicing toghether. Simple words are very ineffective at passing on experience.

And finally successful actions depend on context. For example what makes appropriate bussiness conduct varies from culture to culture, varies in time as the culture changes, is different even in the same culture depending on social class, etc. And these are just some points in the infinite variable group I called context.

All this makes such articles pretty much pointless as a recipe for success. But I'm not sure it is intended as that. There is value in the text, it's just not all true and all applicable to everybody. But then which text is?

Extremely well-written comment! Enjoyed reading it.

To answer your last question I'd say my takeaway is "apply critical thinking to everything, this article included". As you and others point out, PG suffers from survivorship bias and likes to post-hoc rationalize how genius he was.

That definitely isn't something to learn from. One could analyze his career and maybe extract some valuable lessons from it. However I am not even sure PG is a good example at all; once some critical mass is accrued the rest of the success is pretty much inevitable.

So maybe the conclusion is: strive to achieve that critical mass with all your might? Could be.

> Largely, successful people have little idea what they did to succeed at something

Well said. However, most don't seem to realize. There are people who are perfectly willing to pontificate using literally any situation and relating it to their success. Not sure, if it is them or the rest of the plebs who seek their views and put them on a pedestal.

I think you missed the point of the article. It explains why Bob is better than Sally in job A, but Sally is better than Bob in job B. Perhaps you figured that out, but I can't see that from your response, so I'll give you why this was so impactful for me. I went into Aerospace Engineering thinking that I'll be able to design radically different looking airplanes. After two degrees, three internships, three years of employment and several promotions, I quit the industry and started from scratch as a tech entrepreneur looking for a more fulfilling career path. I genuinely believe I could have avoided that whole AE thing if I had been exposed to this article at the right time.

What would have been the right time? When you were a student studying during your first degree or your second? In hindsight, I think it is almost dubious to assume that exposure to this article would have helped you at any given time in the past. It's quite possible you would not have come to the same realization about tech entrepreneurship had you not obtained your AE and had the experiences that you did.

Fair enough - one article alone probably wouldn't have had the full impact. But I am envious of the generation of current high schoolers who can read HN all day. After a year or so, I imagine you can reprogram your mind quite a bit. Back in the late 90s, access to information like this was much more limited.

What you are getting from HN at your current age with your experience, is not the same that what your young self would have gotten from the same content

I learned that working at Google pays a ton and not that hard to get in there. So I learned to code and got a job at Google and made a lot of money thanks to HN. My life got a lot easier thanks to that.

I feel the value of HN is greatly reduced once you are more familiar with the industry. But to an outsider this site is gold.

How is it not hard to get into Google? Sounds more like survivorship bias.

I'm really good at math so I knew that learning the algorithmic thinking wouldn't be hard. All I needed to do was learn to program and learn algorithms. For people with a different skillset it wouldn't be as easy, but reading about it online made me realize that it wouldn't be hard for me.

I mean, when you read about interviews and the problems people struggle with you get a sense of what it is. When I read those I thought "That doesn't seem hard, I can do that!", so I did.

What you are describing is exactly survivorship bias.

Are there any sites that are gold for HNers?

I'm sure that's true.

I would like to say that I am young and I remember getting turned on to podcasts and reddit and good books when I was 15 or so, and being exposed to rational thought and discussion did a lot for my development I think.

Same. Unfortunately the internet isn't what it once was. I can't say I'm optimistic this strategy would work out for today's youth.

Occasionally I stumble upon an old article posted here and start reading, lamenting the missed opportunities if I'd only seen this article x years ago. Then a bit further into it I start feeling like I have read it before, and I suspect I often have.

Start up bros are becoming generic this space is filling up with garbage as well.

That's just the natural life cycle of social platforms.

Looking forward to what will come next

> I quit the industry and started from scratch as a tech entrepreneur looking for a more fulfilling career path

What is it you're doing as an entrepreneur you find so rewarding?

Right this moment I am asking myself how to shift more traffic from paid to organic. I created a list of about 10 ideas, the one at the top of that list being so out there that I had to immediately share it with the team. About half of the team members loved it and thought it will be the best thing ever, and the other half thought it's too expensive and we shouldn't risk so much money on an unproven concept that could fail completely. So the takeaway is quite clear - there might be something there, but I need to come up with an MVP that can be tested quickly (eg: 2 weeks) and cost-efficiently (eg: two weeks of one person's time).

Let me contrast that with my career from 20 years ago. My Master's thesis was to calculate the flight performance of an aircraft that ended up having its maiden flight 5 years later. Essentially, an entirely mathematically-driven exercise where you apply a well-known methodology to calculate a deterministic problem. I got bored of that pretty quickly and went into flight testing, thinking that I could keep my mind active by being more hands-on in my work. I quickly learned that flight testing is all about reading regulations and checking the aircraft for compliance. Sure, there is some flying involved, but nowhere enough to keep you stimulated every day.

If you're reading those two paragraphs above, one will appeal to you more than the other. It doesn't mean that one career path is fundamentally better or worse, it's more about what does YOUR mind need to be stimulated? Do you prefer nondeterministic challenges or would you rather apply existing processes and be super precise and accurate? Do you prefer quick turnaround times, or would you be happier knowing that there is 5 years' worth of budget for you and your team of hundreds of people to complete a project? Whatever your conclusion, you're not wrong - it just has to be right for you. I think PG's essay helped explain this.

> I quickly learned that flight testing is all about reading regulations and checking the aircraft for compliance. Sure, there is some flying involved

I recently watched some videos of people doing plane checklists; one had an error within two minutes, another had only one pilot doing the checklist while the other was away. I've also heard that humans skipping items or entire checklists is a general problem. Out of curiosity, would people with borderline or genuine OCD be a good fit for this? (Would it be practical to factor out the "checklist compliance" into a separate person? Seems like "remaining calm in an emergency, quick thinking, judgment and reflexes", and whatever else I might imagine are best for the pilot are at best orthogonal to "obsessive following of checklists".)

The pilots I know also like a lot of order in the rest of their lives (matching plates, keep their tools in order, just the sort of daily-life organization that is somewhat alien to me). Not to the point of clinically-diagnosed OCD, because I don't think these pilots have intrusive thoughts and compulsions -- they just get positive feelings from having things organized and slightly more deterministic.

OCD is medically disqualifying for pilots.

> > I went into Aerospace Engineering thinking that I'll be able to design radically different looking airplanes.

> What is it you're doing as an entrepreneur you find so rewarding?

The aerospace industry rewards making minor improvements to conventional airplanes rather than building something novel. Entrepreneurship rewards building something new and "radically different", which is what he was looking for in the first place.

Counterpoint: exceedingly few tech entrepreneurship companies are doing anything at all that is really new and "radically different". Most are doing rather small and unimaginative things that make money by doing some equivalent of selling more ads.

If the GP commenter was working at, for example, SpaceX (a large aerospace company), I can 100% guarantee their work would be more meaningful and rewarding than at basically any startup I've ever encountered. It often seems like it's a unique conceit of the HN community to think that most of the tech startups floating around here are really doing much more than established companies.

What's your definition of meaningful and rewarding? I'm an entrepreneur because I love waking up every day and do whatever I feel like. Nothing can be more rewarding for me. I'm not even that interested in what I'm building and it's certainly not something unique or special but it pays the bills and lets me be free.

For myself and most people in my circle of friends it's roughly: actively advancing the level of humanity. That means different things to different people - for some it's working on autonomous vehicles, for others it's space exploration, for others it's fighting climate change or poverty, etc. I think this is also related to age, though. When I was younger, most people I knew thought freedom and money were the best possible things in life.

I 100% get where you're coming from, but allow me to offer a counterpoint to your counterpoint. I don't know anyone who works at SpaceX, but a bunch of my classmates went to work for ULA (their competitor). I imagine that SpaceX is better managed, but the nature of work is the same - you're either calculating things using conventional wisdom, or you're writing simulations or coming up with other ways to achieve higher performance or save money. Either way, the work is slow and highly co-dependent on a million other moving parts. Once a project is complete, your ownership is unlikely to be higher than a tiny fraction of 1 percent. Also, at least at ULA, you better excel at selling your work internally.

On the other hand, SV is littered with names of people who single-handedly turned unprofitable late-stage tech companies into major successes. There's less regulation, stakes are lower, capital requirements are lower, less of the available landscape has been claimed, and the industry lends itself well to the power of computation. It's a little bit like trying to get rich in 18th century England vs 18th century USA. Would it be fair for US farmers to claim that they are doing "radically different" work compared to their English counterparts? Perhaps the work looked similar ("put food on the table"), but the rules and opportunities were vastly different and created different outcomes for individuals (as in - the smartest/most fit/hardest working people got more out of their work).

I respect your perspective, but it's one I mostly see in younger people. It's basically that personal achievement and being able to single-handedly deliver things are the most meaningful outcomes of work. The perspective that I've come to accept is that very few things that actually impact the world can come about this way. We didn't put men on the moon because some genius did all the calculations and fabrication himself (even von Braun was only one part of a very large organization), we did it because thousands of smart and determined people set aside their personal ambitions to work together on something great. The downside of this, of course, is that everyone is effectively a cog in the machine and it's easy to get demoralized that your contributions don't mean much.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you want to actually change the world, you're unlikely to do actually do it at a tech startup. You're instead likely to talk a lot about it while the real world-changing things are happening elsewhere. But you'll probably be happier at the startup because you get more of that magic combination of autonomy, teamwork, and quickly tangible results. I just personally get frustrated that almost every startup and its employees act like they're working on the biggest problems in the world when they just... aren't.

Edit: forgot to mention. I know two people who left ULA for similar reasons to you and went to SpaceX. They loved working at SpaceX in comparison to ULA because the level of company ambition, speed, and impact was so ridiculously higher. However, one of them left SpaceX to go to a smaller aerospace startup and the other is now at Raytheon for the superior work-life balance. I'm not sure what the lesson is there...

Won't address SpaceX though I know people there, but I too used to be on a track with an emphasis on individual accomplishment (academic mathematician) -- a lot about single-handed delivery. Sometime in my late 30s I realized that unfortunately, haha, the most impactful accomplishments are team efforts. To do big work, I realized I should find the right team. I am still working out what this means for my own career, but it's a huge change in mindset. And I'm working at a large, old-ish corporation now, and I think we are slowly & painfully changing how something very practical gets done.

ULA is definitely not like SpaceX and is not a competitor at this point. ULA is failing due to the exact problems that you describe and if your rocket is not reusable, it cannot compete outside government launches at this point. The only other rocket company that I see competing at the moment is Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin (and we are still waiting for the first New Glen launch). SpaceX is different with Elon Musk leading the engineering. Move fast, iterate, everyone working on the project should understand the whole vehicle so that people can see when making radical changes is the way forward. SpaceX was building carbon fiber pieces for their next rocket after the Falcon 9/Heavy, and completely scrapped that idea and went with a steel hull instead. About a year later the new design is going to launch up to 15km and land in the next few weeks.

Elon Musk comes from the start-up world and he is hoping to get to Mars himself, so he is in a hurry. I would say if you can get a job there, you should. If you have not already, check out reddit/r/spacex for lots of interesting stuff about the company and what they are doing. You might want to apply to work there if you are looking for a fast paced aerospace company.

There is also the startup called Boom that is working on building a supersonic passenger plane. They have just finished a smaller human-piloted supersonic test plane to prove out their ideas and hope to have the commercial airplane in service by 2025.

These companies are both run by people that started in software and then moved to aerospace without any other real prior experience in the field. Maybe you can have a similar route with founding a successful software company and then, with that success, found an aerospace one of your own. Good luck.

Maybe they founded boom?

I wish! I left AE before I realized that more recently opportunities started opening up for entrepreneurially-minded engineers. The whole quadcopter space was probably a pretty good opportunity for people with a background in AE.

I don't know, but I rather hear sporting/fitness advice from someone that won NBA finals, or the soccer World Cup, then just some random loser. The winner at least can tell you how they did succeed personally, even if they have no comprehensive studies with data.

On the other hand, you are just a random guy from the internet, and offering advice with no data at all.

You might be broke and posting from your mom's basement, or from the top of a penthouse that you bought from building successful companies/startups.

We don't know, so your advice will be treated like: just another opinion, from a internet rando/keyboard warrior, and everyone has opinions.

I listen to PG as he has been more right then wrong, also he was very successful, multiple times, and is single handedly a major contributer to many products I use.

Many successful people overrate their personal characteristics and underrate the degree to which they were merely in the right place at the right time and such. Fortune favors the prepared, of course, but I personally believe there are far more people in the world who are adequately prepared for success who do not succeed because they are under-resourced or poorly connected.

only when the tide turns, you get to see who was swimming naked.

luck plays an important part, but not everyone realizes it or admits it.

And yet... those who stay in the game and who try new things regularly get “lucky” while those who quit, don’t develop and learn from a process, and who try the same methods over and over don’t get lucky.

It is far too simple to say that it is only luck. Persistence and good processes often lead to “luck”.

We have a saying in one of the Bulgarian towns:

"Luck doesn't come to you, you go to it".

Which is to say you are right: if you keep showing up at stuff you will eventually get lucky. Luck can only happen to those who try and get lucky. Our real world resembles an MMORPG game -- you need a team for 98% of everything -- then I'd say both you and your parent poster are correct.

Hence why I said fortune favors the prepared. If you’re not ready for the opportunity you’re going to miss it when it hits.

> which they were merely in the right place at the right time and such.

If you are successful several times against the odds it's probably not just mere coincidence anymore. You know, stats.

Unless you have VCs betting on the same horse... Accrual of advantage, etc etc.

You also likely have funds to float you for longer.

You also likely have a network to leverage/exploit.

These external things all can stem from a lucky first go.

Hard to say. There are knock-on effects from being highly successful. If you win the lottery and subsequently become a highly successful investor, for example, there’s a clear element of chance. You may have the latent abilities of an investor and the skills to fully realize them, but without the opportunity afforded by a windfall you would never find out.

If someone lucky to be in area/time of great development or inherited a lot of money, or have a good connections...

Then following your advise in less lucky situation is likely to fail.

With sufficiently large population, someone will randomly win against unlikely odds. For example, if there is a 1% chance your startup will succeed, but one million people try it, statistically one of them will have 3 successful startups in a row even without being better than average.

Though, realistically, the chance should increase for the following attempts, because you can reuse some resources and contacts you gained with the first success. The first startup is like "I need to succeed within three years, or return to a regular job to pay my bills". But if it succeeds, the second startup is like "I can keep trying as long as I want to, no pressure".

> because they are under-resourced or poorly connected

This is soluble.

Often not by the people in that situation but as a society yes it absolutely should be soluble.

Then how did the first people in that situation do it?

Said differently, who invented the first bootstraps and how did they do it without bootstraps?

It's funny you mention taking advice from successful pro athletes. I'm reminded of a great essay, "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" by David Foster Wallace.

He writes about his admiration for a successful pro tennis athlete, her intensity and dedication to her sport, and her strangely vacuous response to the question "How do you do it Tracy?" - which she answers with some vague platitudes. His point is: very successful people are so busy being successful, they're so deeply immersed in their craft, that they don't seem to even have the conscious introspective wherewithal to articulate what it is they're doing. Everything they know about their craft and their life is just so tacit to them. They've either never taken the time to really introspect, again because they're so caught up in just winning and getting things done, or they're just genuinely incapable of gleaning any wisdom from what it is that they do. So maybe it's not particularly useful to take advice from these people after all.

Now, this is probably the case for most such people, but there is a very small minority that do eventually cultivate the ability to articulate their internalized understanding and wisdom of their success to others. Maybe PG is one of them. Maybe not.

If you want to destroy someone's game - just ask how they do it. Thats why you learn a lot by teaching others.

This is an almost ironic response to the article for a couple of reasons that caught my attention (read: not a bad response, just somewhat ironic).

The first was mentioned by someone else in the thread whose response i can't find again due to opening this in a different device: why is it more valuable to hear advice from winners than, say, a failure from their mother's basement as you put it? In relation to the article's key point, that's very conventional (hence the irony) :)

The second thing I noticed was the assumption that a successful person knows their success or could explain it to anyone -- I haven't found this to be true and can personally attest that I can rarely explain my own to someone else. But there are definitely other reasons I can't, not least I'm just a poor explainer.

I found the article intriguing for a lot of reasons, not least of which is I always see a bit of myself in nerd content like it. I found myself thinking of all the conventions I absorb and recall when I realized I'd absorbed them. On the other hand, I'm renown in my family and among friends as completely unconventional and am generally The Weirdo. The resolution of that tension is intensely interesting to me. How I see all the conventions in myself, but near no one else seems to see it that way at all.

More to the point: given the option, I'll read the advice of a failure in a heartbeat and ponder it for days. I've never found advice from "pros" or success stories to be nearly as interesting. If you can, explain why opinions from winners is more interesting to you. Genuinely intrigued and curious to hear a different perspective.

Someone who failed because of doing everything obviously wrong from the start... that would be boring.

But someone who almost succeeded, and then failed because of X... if you want to try the same thing, you probably want to know about X. You probably want to know about X regardless, because it may generalize to other situations.

It's fine to listen to him. And your logic is sound. And I am in my parent's basement. My post was firstly a question and secondly an opinion on this type of content. So, it's good to know you appreciate it and might be at a different place in your evolution in content consumption. We are all different and get benefits from different things. Just wanted to know where others stood.

I'd rather hear stories from people who fucked up hard than some celebo with yet another generic advice

You know, learn from mistakes of others.

> I don't know, but I rather hear sporting/fitness advice from someone that won NBA finals, or the soccer World Cup, then just some random loser. The winner at least can tell you how they did succeed personally, even if they have no comprehensive studies with data.

> On the other hand, you are just a random guy from the internet, and offering advice with no data at all.

So do you listen to Sam Altman?

Say Hellooo to survivorship bias, then!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

You're throwing half of the information away. You need to know not just what to do, but also what not to do. Losers can teach you about mistakes, injuries etc.

Obligatory xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/1827/

Regardless of whether the argument of the commenter is valid or not, appeal to authority isn't very compelling.

pg boosters all seem to be forgetting that the opposite of an ad hominem is an appeal to authority.

Good luck

I don't see that here. I see someone trying to figure out things that interest him. As for unconventional ideas and observations, here's one:

Political extremists [...] think themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists. Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average person's are.

The material of that bit may not be unusual, but its precision and density certainly are, and the fact that it coins a great name for the phenomenon (niche conformism) easily clears the bar for "unconventional idea/observation" in my book. Also, there's nothing formula-for-successy there. You might be missing the best reasons for reading these things?

yeah but the funny thing is it applies to the VC and tech scene more than to almost anything else. Tech people are niche conformists, a lot of them read the same books, speak the same language, share the same hobbies, look the same, and copy each others ideas.

Copying something well and then deluding yourself or others into thinking you've dug up novelty is in fact one of the best sales strategies there is.

Paul is also not accurate in one important way. Investors, by definition of how they make money, can't be too novel. They only can be ahead of the curve, because if you're so independent minded that the market doesn't catch up with what you believe you don't make any money. They're not independent-minded so much as they know what others want when they don't yet know it themselves. That's a different thing.

The phenomenon is called "conformity." Nothing in it ever suggested it only applies to large groups. Reading the first paragraph of Wikipedia will tell you as much.

Nonetheless, people do in fact make that mistake -- such as the niche conformists PG mentions -- so it is worth rebutting, and doing so in an understandable manner. The fact that you may not have seen a particular mistake, does not mean the mistake is not out there (and personally, based on my own experience, I'd say this one is rather common).

The purpose of these essays might be more PR exercise for YC than an effort to foster efficacy among would-be world-beaters.

"When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen" ;-)

He was writing this way and thinking about this for years before YC existed. I think it's more that these essays and YC have a common cause.

> cultivate relationships because that seems to be the thing people regret most when they die.

Dying regrets are bullshit, because those people actually made conscious choices not to invest into such relationships on a daily basis and would do it again if they were in the same situation. I don't buy it.

Formula for success:

1. Find a way to afford time to focus on what you care about. 2. Repeat step 1.

For a lot of people, step 1 is a steady job so they can do things they care about outside of work with family and friends. For others, it’s finding time to work on a project or startup you care about.

Ultimately, buying your own time back is the key to it all. What that key unlocks is up to you to decide.

This article is self-contradictory. The premise of the article is that you have to be unconventional and do things others aren't do to be successful. And then the author "proves" the premise by saying, "just like all these other successful people did!"

The formulae are all driven by survivorship bias anyway.

It can simultaneously be true that to be successful in your field, you need to be unconventional relative to that field, and also that the means and methods for being usefully unconventional transfer across fields.

"This article is self-contradictory. The article says good programmers write code in a way that doesn't cause surprises for the reader. But the only way for a program to be totally unsurprising is if it's an exact copy of another program which already exists!"

...

"The formulae are all driven by survivorship bias anyway."

In PG's case, he's had a chance to observe a lot of startups, both successes and failures.

But even aside from this, survivorship bias is mainly a problem in the presence of downside risk. Let's say we look at Olympic champions and find that they all trained really hard. You cry: "Survivorship bias! It could be that you will train really hard and not become an Olympic champion!" Yes. It could be. But since the risks of training hard are relatively low, you may as well go ahead and train hard if being an Olympic champion is a serious goal for you.

Perhaps I'm misusing the term or using the wrong term. Could by hindsight bias. I'm talking about when a person a group accomplishes something, looks back at what they did, and they tries to decide post hoc which of the things they did contributed to their success.

He claims you have to be unconventional to be successful in pursuits which reward independent thinking. He named at least one profession where being conventional is desirable: an administrator.

Humans are excellent at finding patterns where there are none. I don't think that changes when a bunch of 0s end up in your bank account.

A successful investor is almost by definition someone who's good at finding and exploiting patterns in the market.

> Here is my formula for success (in case anyone cares): Enjoy life, try to make the world better, be a good person, go towards your passions (whether for hobby or career) and cultivate relationships because that seems to be the thing people regret most when they die.

A nice mantra. Not dissimilar to the top of PG's to do list. There he also describes "the biggest regrets of the dying"..

"Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy."

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

> This essay [...], without evidence or data, implies that some of us know the formula for success.

PG isn't claiming to know "the" formula for success, or that anyone else knows it (I doubt there could be such a thing). He's identifying and exploring traits that, from his considerable experience, seem to correlate with business success in a very narrow field, startup companies.

I get your point and I get the reason people like to find correlations. I just think reducing dimensionality of really complex stuff is a waste of our time unless your purely talking about investing/gambling and increasing your odds on many bets. It just doesn’t help the “single path” people out there (maybe it wasn’t intended to). We aren’t an average of a simulation, we are just one scenario.

Analogy (because I love analogies): “Seems like people over 7 feet tall make great basketball players.” This is great but it’s much more interesting that a guy named Muggsy Bogues made it to the NBA at 5 foot 3 inches.

I think that's why PG's discussion of whether and how a motivated individual can change or enhance these attributes is interesting, along with the observation that strength in one can make up for relative weakness in another.

I think your analogy fails in that hanging out with tall people can't make you taller. Exceptions to general rules are interesting, but don't have much predictive or explanatory power.

The title itself is very ironic. Learn how to think for yourselves from? Yourselves? No. From Paul Graham who doesn't even know your name.

I wouldn't consider this as a formula for success but a sounding board. Most times we are lost in complexities of life and choices, articles like these enable us to get back and re-think, provide clarity. They should be considered as triggers or questions that we should be asking ourselves than a formula.

This is philosophy, should be treated as such.

No you’re not the only one to think this. That’s why this is currently the top comment.

I guess you’re not very independent-minded.

Plus there's the irony of an article telling you how to think for yourself.

1. Luck 2. Don't screw up.

Then move on and find something that is more helpful for you?

Why the need to trash it, (complete with fashionably dragging in gender, race, economic inequality and political ideology), because it doesn't resonate with you?

I got a lot out of it, and am glad he took the time to write it.

> How to think for yourself... let me teach you!

I actually find this advice (taken literally) to be the best advice for thinking for yourself. Teach others and you’ll find yourself opening up to new viewpoints on topics versus “learning” the same topic.

why are you so upset?

"without evidence or data"

It seems worth noting that although this essay doesn't have a lot of the way in evidence/data, it is likely informed by PG's extensive experience as a startup investor. I would guess that YC has a proprietary dataset of the startups they've funded that they use to test hypotheses etc.