You're wasting effort with this. It feels good to write. It feels good to hear when you're in that situation. It doesn't help you. It's not about money, it's about positive indicators. An Ivy League school is a positive indicator, starting a company is a positive indicator. Kicking Ass on your own personal or side projects is a positive indicator. Open Source contributions are a positive indicator. Previous work experience that you can explain well and brag about is a positive indicator. Build your positive indicators, and don't complain about others building theirs.
Some people have to work harder than others to get the same recognition or success. Don't measure against them, measure against you. Be better than you were the day before, don't pretend that it's about having money "laying around".
I came here to say that, but you said it better than I might have.
I would like to add that his/her post reeked of rationalization fueled by insecurity.
In real life, there are sometimes reasons we fail that are beyond our control. There are always excuses for failure that have some truth in them. There are always ways that we can look at the successful as lucky SOBs and the unsuccessful as victims of cruel fate.
While it's interesting to contemplate the roles of skill and luck in success on a Sunday afternoon -- I've never met a really successful person who didn't have a positive outlook on her ability to mold her opportunities, to watch for chances to make a move, and to sieze those moments that were right and ride them to success.
To glorify happenstance (the particular school you can afford to go to) and self-victimhood is a self-fulfilling prophecy and guaranteed way to minimize your own chances of ever being successful at anything.
Are we our knowledge and experiences? Are we our genetic potential? Are we our upbringing? Are we just products of random chance and our environment? The more I learn in life, the more I become convinced that we are our ATTITUDE. Attitude is the prime factor in success or failure. It is the leading indicator to me when I go to hire someone or decide whether or not I want to work with him.
I don't care what school you went to -- if success is your goal, then start with attitude. Adopt one that drives you to focus on yourself and your own improvement every day of your life. Good things will follow.
Attitude itself though is something that is molded by life experiences. It's very easy to say "Just adopt a positive attitude!" but this is something that is difficult to really do when you perceive the penalty of failure to be high and the odds of success to be low.
As an example of this, in the UK they have tried to combat unemployment by sending people on courses where they try to re-enforce a "you can do anything you want if you try hard enough" philosophy. This seems disingenuous however since you have to think about the person giving the message and ask whether their life ambition was really trying to herd unemployed people.
It's very easy to say "Just adopt a positive attitude!" but this is something that is difficult to really do when you perceive the penalty of failure to be high and the odds of success to be low.
I never said it was easy. It's very difficult, partly because it's hard to accomplish, partly because it's esoteric and hard to even understand for many people. If you have a bad attitude, then it's hard to appreciate the importance of even trying to have a good attitude.
This seems disingenuous however since you have to think about the person giving the message and ask whether their life ambition was really trying to herd unemployed people.
That kind of cynicism is a trap that keeps people from breaking free of their own attitude-based limitations. Maybe the message givers just want to help people and they're performing an extraordinarily important service? Maybe the job they're doing is just a step along the way to other ambitions and heights in their careers?
It's good to focus on what you can do. But that doesn't mean that your life circumstances aren't largely determined by factors beyond your control. That just boils down to social darwinism - anyone who is doing well obviously just worked harder. This just isn't true.
If you are sailing in high winds, all you can do is try to compensate for them. Sinking isn't an option. But neither is it an option to pretend that there aren't any winds applying to you. Only people who have no experience of winds will assume that people are only at risk because they are grossly negligent or lazy or stupid.
Huh. Impressive how much of my personality comes across that way. You're right, on pretty much everything. I am insecure, though I've never understood the difference between rationalization and circumstance. When you're betting more or less your future on you being excellent in your given field, that can really do a number on your self confidence.
Nevertheless, I appreciate the critique. Besides the list of projects I'm working on and my job, any advice for how to improve?
Rationalization = excusing your lack of success based on factors beyond your control, circumstance = accepting the factors beyond your control and playing the hell out of the factors that are in your control.
It's too bad that Marc Andreesen took his career advice blog post off the Internet, because he had some of the best advice I've seen. It was:
1. Build skills & relationships.
2. Take advantage of opportunities
Basically, all of the big leaps in your career will happen because some random big opportunity outside of your control will open up. When it does, jump on it. Immediately. Drop everything you're doing for it. Most people don't, and that is why most people slave away their lives in cubicles.
But to seize that opportunity, you need to be qualified, and you need to hear about it. So all the time that you're not actively seizing an opportunity, you should be building your skill base and getting to know other people. That's the important part: opportunities happen to everybody, but the vast majority of people aren't in a position to take advantage of them.
> I've never understood the difference between rationalization and circumstance.
Let's start there. Circumstance is a fact, rationalization is a story you tell yourself. Of course there is all types of rationalization and all types of stories. In this case though, your circumstance and your personal narrative are combining with a pessimistic quality. Pessimism is not always bad, it may be a good hedge against disappointment.
In this case you are taking it too far though. You could just as easily be telling yourself a positive story about your ability to execute on side projects while holding down a day job, or the fact that you are young and have low expenses, or that you are fortunate enough to be passionate about one of the few careers that's not shrinking these days, or even the fact that you won the birth lottery. It actually doesn't matter what you tell yourself though, as long as it helps maximize your potential. You could be the richest white kid in Beverly Hills or the poorest peasant in China, your attitude is the greatest thing you can control that can affect your circumstance. That doesn't mean the rich kid has much chance of being a billionaire or the peasant can reasonably hope to make $50k/year, but within their respective circumstances, attitude and action can make a world of difference.
"It feels good to write. It feels good to hear when you're in that situation. It doesn't help you."
I feel that there are many contrary-to-conventional-wisdom articles that can be characterized like this. All too often they get traction, especially on HN, despite their obliviousness of how reality even works. Kudos for a good critique of this story's tone and framing.
Beggars can't be choosers and the world is not just. So what is there to say about it?
If you were in demand and had a network of supporters, you could say all kinds of ridiculous things and get public applause. If you were hiring for a promising company with ample resources, you could take on more of a superior tone. And there would be others forced to tolerate it.
But you are in need. So even if you weren't insecure, you don't have the position to seem big. Therefore, you are a nice target: you take a beating on HN for being negative, and get to hear that you should pull yourself up by the bootstraps, etc. (things which people in a stronger bargaining position don't hear).
If you were not in such a poor position, people would be more inclined to kiss up to you and approve of what you said, even if it were basically stupid.
Larry Summers was recently quoted as saying that the best indicator of future success is not the school you graduated from but the best school you were accepted by.
I have every intention of doing just that, when it comes to both improving myself and those positive indicators. Perhaps my frustration stems from that work seeming worthless when compared to an Ivy League degree.
Would you say I'm wrong that not all positive indicators are created equal?
Truth be told, an Ivy League degree would not get you much by itself. There are a number of schools just as good as the Ivy League, and similar brand recognition in particular fields for schools that otherwise aren't highly regarded or well-known.
The Ivy League degree primarily buys you an opportunity to network with the powerful, get interesting internships and so forth. Not everyone does much with this. Those who don't might get +5 points or something but it's not a night and day difference.
(Except if you are looking at a specific school-to-company nexus like Stanford has with certain companies)
Those goods are not impossible to get from schools with somewhat less standing.
The problem is that in school, nobody is very aggressively counseling and seeking the interest of students who do not know what to do and might not even be aware there is anything they would have to do.
So the slack has to be taken up after you leave school in various ways and it can just be hard. One of the things you have to do is pretend to be happy with the status quo, not look negative and make people feel smart and awesome if they have something to hold over you.
No all positive indicators are not created equal and the which school did you go to is one of the smaller ones
- certainly for undergraduates. Good schools deliver three things
1. Higher self confidence than average. This is oftenentitlement not talent
2. Good networking - yes but these days so does LinkedIn
3. Better teaching. Top universities do shine here. But that is the point. And really at undergraduate level it barely matters.
In short, stop worrying about the college you are going to / went to. Feeling you missed out? Read SICP
but if you really want one piece of right now advice here it is - choose one, just one of those ideas you have. And find evenings, lunch hours weekends and get that one idea out the door. Just do it. Then post to Show HN
everything else follows from getting something out the door
Not all positive indicators are created equal. It's totally true. An Ivy league degree is recognizably hard, and it's an easy quantifier, if . If your work is equally hard, you need to figure out a way to show that. You may also have to work harder to find connections in small tight circles that are slightly more immediate if you went to an Ivy League school (that's part of what you're paying for to be totally frank). You can lament it privately, or you can keep learning and keep kicking ass. You could do great through your undergrad and get an Ivy-class education for post-graduate work if you really wanted. Do good work. Show it off to people that would be interested in it. If the people that you think you want to be around aren't interested in the work you're doing, you've got the wrong people, or your work isn't really that good. Figure out which it is, that isn't always easy.
I wrote one of these articles in 2009. Looking back it was stupid. I live in Palo Alto now. I'm working for another startup and learning very different things than I learned by starting a startup, or running a consultancy. I'm also better connected here. Try to take your assumptions and turn them totally on their head "what if pg is 100% correct about 'why to be in a startup hub'?" and try to prove to yourself that he is. It's good practice for all critical thinking.
I don't know what you work on. It's probably not worthless compared to an ivy league degree, but it depends what you want, and why you're comparing them. Learn to do the things that will get you what you want, and learn how to present those to other people, and you'll (hopefully) quit feeling like others got where they were just because they had more cash, you don't buy a degree in CS from Brown, you earn one.
I don't know where you are, or what you're working on, but feel free to reach out, I'm happy to have a conversation about it, in person or online.
Some people have to work harder than others to get the same recognition or success. Don't measure against them, measure against you. Be better than you were the day before, don't pretend that it's about having money "laying around".