My father was an elite worker in a Communist country. He cared about his work(in contrast with most of his colleges), was smart and had an independent mindset. He left because his life was impossible to live there. He went away with some close relatives while it was yet possible(over time it became almost impossible to escape).
In a capitalist society and with very little money he experienced a shock at first but over time he did very well.
Going back for visiting after the Iron Curtain fell he was considered someone like a traitor or something by the people that remained there. Most of them were nostalgic of the communist regime.
It is easy to understand, first the people that loved freedom or autonomy either left or were just exterminated. The people that remained were like sheep with zero personal initiative that needed constantly someone leading them telling them what to do.
Then suddenly the System collapses and they are told to live by their own means. They are old(and old dogs can't learn new tricks) and there is no people around that can show them as they were exterminated, or institutions, or examples to copy.
Countries like the US were created mostly by people that could not stand being told what to do in their original European countries. That makes not only the structures in the US but their genetics as well.
In communist countries people with initiative were exterminated and that not only affected their economic and political structures, but their genetics as well, they did not passed their genes to a new generation.
Probably because of my genes I am entrepreneur today. It is not for everyone as there is not such a thing as "safety".
In my career I started getting close to the people that had already done what I wanted and just asked them for advice.
The advice they gave me was incredible and the most useful thing you could do.
The most important thing is that it must be an active process. You must do the work to decode and extract the information.
Different personalities will give you different advices. If someone has a very strong visceral nature, her advice is going to be "don't be too visceral, think before you act", because that is the advice she needs, but not what you need.
That advice is completely useless if your nature is thinking too much, and you don't have a problem thinking, you love to think all the time. The advice you need is acting instead of thinking, to take decisions.
So you need to be active and ask specifically the problems you are having when trying to do what you wanted. Most of the time you will realize the super big problems that you have are the most stupid and obvious thing for the person you are asking.
It is so easy for them because their own nature or personality makes it so for them. 9 times out of 10 they will give you an easy, "obvious" solution you never thought about.
If you learn something in a bad way it takes more effort that learning that straight well.
If you learn English pronunciation from Europeans you are not really learning English, you are learning Spanish, German or French pronunciation rules on English words.
Spain and all the Spanish speaking countries(Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela,Ecuador, Peru...) is such a big environment speaking just one language that they usually don't have the need to learn proper English pronunciation. You could even live in parts of the US speaking Spanish only.
Also happens with French in Africa. I have so many French friends that don't speak English well because they don't need it.
Any Spanish speaker can communicate with a Portuguese, French and specially Italian with little effort because they are so similar.
It also happens in Germany, being much smaller environment but having all those Nordic countries that speak Germanic languages they can communicate with little effort.
The exception being small countries like Netherlands or Switzerland in which work is done in English being interconnected with the global economy.
As someone who has spent more than 10 years working remotely I don't understand what you are talking about.
When I was working away I spent two hours everyday on my car commuting breathing the toxic air of traffic jams of big cities. That exhausted me and was very expensive in time, energy and money.
I can interact with humans I love on my own terms now much more time than that every day. I can do exercise outside for an hour on the Wild, a luxury impossible before.
Are you an adult or a child? Are you a slave or a serf?
It looks like you have some kind of education that make you powerless when nobody tells you what to do every second.
That even in your own house you are not the master, but someone else is.
I recommend the first thing you do is work on your mindset:
You are the master of your life and can take ownership and responsibility for it.
I know extremely successful people and all of them made huge mistakes in their lives. But I don't believe you are using a good strategy here and find your advice is bad:
1. You should quit as soon as possible is you are getting nowhere. We don't need more miserable entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is probably not for you if you fail consistently. Don't waste your live doing something you are miserable at.
2. Each failure can really hurt you, no different from making a mistake while skiing or driving. It can destroy your life: Your relationships, your wealth and health.
3. You don't automatically improve as time passes. Specially if you learn on your own without good teachers. You will acquire "bad practices" or "vices" like if you try to learn to play tennis on your own: It will take you longer to "unlearn" your vices than if you learned from good teachers.
The first thing I would recommend is that you make friends that are entrepreneurs so you learn from each other and support each other.
I sense a very individualistic behavior from your writing but I see customers as friends and that helped me a lot. I give them way more value that what I extract to support my business, and that is the secret. People are not stupid, in the same way children "sense" who really loves them fast, customers could sense very fast the value you give them.
You also develop over time a good intuition on the value you are creating if you know how to listen to your custommers.
You don't need 12 years for that, 1 or 2 years is enough.
I understand that "what does not kill you makes you stronger" but I have experienced what failure feels, and it really can kill you, emotionally, mentally, socially and finally physically.
The way to success is making mistakes frequent and small, so small that it can't hurt you: Instead of risking a million dollars you risk a thousand and escalate.
Instead of making mistakes you meet the people that have done what you want and you learn from THEIR mistakes, so you don't need to repeat them.
They will help you and love to do so. Dozens of entrepreneurs have helped me when I just asked them and some of them are good friends now.
The guy had a bunch of great ideas because he did things like dissecting hundreds of bodies, studied and analyzed and drew what he learned so other people could benefit from that.
He was a master painter that worked all the time.
Most engineering ideas of Da Vinci were shit precisely because he never executed them. But he was a great illustrator.
This is a horrible story: Someone works so much that falls sleep and kills his family members.
Working so much is the definition of "negative returns": Working over the limits of exhaustion means you do not only not create wealth, but destroy it in huge amounts. And killing people is an invaluable loss.
If you work so much that fall sleep with your truck and destroy your truck, if you only destroy material things like your truck you just evaporated years of work. If you kill people you just have destroyed your entire life.
When I started working on a warehouse as an adolescent, a working colleague fall sleep for working so much with the forklift and had an accident. It meant hundreds of thousands of euros in medical procedures for the insurer, and never being able to walk again normally for the rest of his life.
It is not worth it but people do it again an again.
People that do it are not role models. It is a toxic influence.
Pick role models of people that work reasonable hours and are wealthy and healthy.
>how on earth am I going to convince my corpo overlords that this language belongs anywhere near a production system?
Well, I don't see any difference with any other language you could use, from SQL, to C ,CSS or JSON.
The fact is that the higher your corpo overlord, the less is he going to understand your scrawl.
Instead of them understanding your language, it is you who need to speak theirs. You will need to understand MBA talk in order to communicate in simple terms(elevator pitch) why you using this weird language is important for the company.
Then they will leave you alone if what you promised is true, or just fire you if it is not.
Logical people(usually called Smart people) could be really really stupid.
Einstein as a young fellow certainly did not change Planck's mind, and Heisenberg did not change Einstein's.
Doesn't matter if we talk about Magellan, Newton or Darwin. They changed the world one death at a time.
The reason is that logic is based on very few things(usually binary statements, true or false) and it can focus only on those things. They can dissect and understand deeply something very small and dead(static) but could have real problems understanding the whole system(big and alive[dynamic]).
You only can focus on 5,6 things at a single time and need to invest a ton of time to get results. The world is not pure binary, like mathematics usually study it,the world have shades of gray and billions of things interacting all the time.
In fact, without tools like cheap access to books that make it possible to complete the work someone else has done,and networks that share the knowledge like Universities, cities or the Internet, this process of analysis is so slow that it is completely useless.
For understanding complete systems intuition is just much better and faster. Because it is an stochastic process that could integrate millions of things at once.
For changing your mind you need proper training in the scientific process, and it takes a lot of work and effort to do, because it goes against our primal instincts. You need to be humble and train a beginner's mind all the time.
The fact is that most people believe they are logical while everybody else is dogmatic. But they are not.
They can not do something as basic exercise as proper debate in which they believe and defend only temporarly the opposite of what they really believe.
Really logical people can see their own flaws as a human(illusions and biases) and only then compensate for them.
I bet you,hilyen, believe your thinking is logic based. Hah!
I believe the article is an example of overthinking.
If you think so much about an issue without the right data you will get wrong conclusions. In other words, garbage in, garbage out, no matter how smart(how good your processing unit is) you are. This woman looks intellectually smart, emotionally dumb and immature.
This woman had a pathological relationship and generalizes over it. She is projecting that relationship over everyone, and that is a serious mistake.
In spite of being an adult woman she has a "victim mentality" and a tendency to create a "self fulfilling prophecy" because healthy people will avoid her like the plague.
People that had a healthy relationship with their parents or people in general does not want or need to deal with people that consider every one else an abuser, just because they were abused by someone.
If your father rapes you your mind will associate all men as rapists because he is the most important man in your life. But that is wrong.
If your parents are enemies inside marriage with a terrible relationship you will generalize all marriages as bad because it it the marriage that you know better. But that is wrong.
The way to deal with long lasting traumas is working on it emotionally, not rationally and usually over a long time too until you can make progress.
Looks like many companies in Japan are worried about remote working, something that is not a surprise given the slow rate of innovation of Japanese culture.
This is just a bad PR campaign against remote working. That someone can transfer more than 100 million without safeguards does not make any sense, working from home or not.
And if you can do that you are not a "Sony staffer" or worker, you are a Sony high ranking executive.
>SpaceX didn't develop ground-breaking firsts like Sputnik and the moon landings
I would say the ground breaking things were done by amateurs like Mr Von Braun as children playing with rockets.
What governments(Hitler first, then US and Russia) did was escalating something that was already proven and worked, and that was proven my amateurs.
The flights of Otto Lilienthal or the Wright brothers were extremely short, but they were the groundbreaking things that governments later escalated very fast.
I certainly believe that break even will be proven by private companies, not by Governments bureaucracies that continuously say that fusion in 30 years is reasonable.
After breakeven is proven, there will be a tsunami of investments from Governments just like with aviation or rockets.
It is not, for most people. If you are autistic, have Asperger's syndrome like Elon Musk, or have other mental issues, then no matter how much you work, you will be always subpar compared to others on this area, but probably are much better on other areas like research.
I don't like talking about "social skills" because it looks like having friends is an academic matter or something. It is not, it is about letting yourself go around people you trust not about writing down what to say or do.
Most people in the US don't have friends by the way. When you are used to places like Spain, Italy or Africa it shocks you how isolated and individualistic they are living alone without public places so they don't really need to interact with anyone. They take their cars and drive from home to work.
They have an average of 0.5 friends per person or something like that so if you want to learn having more friends you could change your environment for something that forces you to interact with lots of people for a while.
>All users would have liked Fords with multiple colours rather than black.
They did, over time, choose car manufactures with different colors. But they also loved the price Ford could get for them making only one color available, at first.
The problem was that getting multiple colors made your car extremely expensive and the car had to wait way longer in the queue for the paint to dry. But only at first, over time those problems got solved and people could get to choose colors for cheap.
Today everybody wants closed 3d printers with swappable heads that could print multiple materials and support. They just don't want to pay USD3.000 for it when they can buy a printer for USD200.
If you want to be successful you always have to listen to your users. But you also need common sense.
I agree that YC business is prospecting, but I don't believe they prospect ideas, they prospect people.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, and the same idea could be a success or failure depending on execution quality, and execution quality depends on people.
Making happen people are actually idea people, each of then have hundreds of ideas in their mind, that just have the guts to make them happen. They go in the arena and fight and most of the time they loose. Over time if they survive they get stronger and wiser and fighting becomes easier for them.
For finding those people that are a minority in the world you need attractors that attract people all around the world.
YC matches young "make it happen people" with money, resources and old people that "made it happen " in the past.
The "idea people" that believe they have a brilliant idea you should pay then 50% for are abundant and completely useless.
Once you become successful every day you will talk with one of those idea people that spend so much time dreaming and no time risking or working on their ideas, because getting in the arena and getting hurt is not enjoyable or beautiful.
Ancient greeks had actually a very similar system of participation on maritime endeavors.
They even supported poets in order to create fiction and propaganda about the amazing things and riches that were abroad. Making young people travel also relieved demographical pressure.
If you lost a ship by shipwreck, you lost it all, but it was very profitable if the ship returned. Like anything in life, the were "naturals" that will return and succeed, people that were really good at it for whatever reason.
In a capitalist society and with very little money he experienced a shock at first but over time he did very well.
Going back for visiting after the Iron Curtain fell he was considered someone like a traitor or something by the people that remained there. Most of them were nostalgic of the communist regime.
It is easy to understand, first the people that loved freedom or autonomy either left or were just exterminated. The people that remained were like sheep with zero personal initiative that needed constantly someone leading them telling them what to do.
Then suddenly the System collapses and they are told to live by their own means. They are old(and old dogs can't learn new tricks) and there is no people around that can show them as they were exterminated, or institutions, or examples to copy.
Countries like the US were created mostly by people that could not stand being told what to do in their original European countries. That makes not only the structures in the US but their genetics as well.
In communist countries people with initiative were exterminated and that not only affected their economic and political structures, but their genetics as well, they did not passed their genes to a new generation.
Probably because of my genes I am entrepreneur today. It is not for everyone as there is not such a thing as "safety".