Category: General Interest

Items of general interest – for mass consumption

Who gets lucky?

Another long Marc Andreessen post, this time talking about the different kinds of “luck” and gives ideas on how you can go about getting luck on your side. Excerpt:

This of course leads to a number of challenges for how we live our lives as entrepreneurs and creators in any field:

* How energetic are we? How inclined towards motion are we? Those of you who read my first age and the entrepreneur post will recognize that this is a variation on the “optimize for the maximum number of swings of the bat” principle. In a highly uncertain world, a bias to action is key to catalyzing success, and luck, and is often to be preferred to thinking things through more throughly.

* How curious are we? How determined are we to learn about our chosen field, other fields, and the world around us? In my post on hiring great people, I talked about the value I place on curiosity — and specifically, curiosity over intelligence. This is why. Curious people are more likely to already have in their heads the building blocks for crafting a solution for any particular problem they come across, versus the more quote-unquote intelligent, but less curious, person who is trying to get by on logic and pure intellectual effort.

* How flexible and aggressive are we at synthesizing — at linking together multiple, disparate, apparently unrelated experiences on the fly? I think this is a hard skill to consciously improve, but I think it is good to start most creative exercises with the idea that the solution may come from any of our past experiences or knowledge, as opposed to out of a textbook or the mouth of an expert. (And, if you are a manager and you have someone who is particularly good at synthesis, promote her as fast as you possibly can.)

* How uniquely are we developing a personal point of view — a personal approach — a personal set of “eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors” that will uniquely prepare us to create? This, in a nutshell, is why I believe that most creative people are better off with more life experience and journeys afield into seemingly unrelated areas, as opposed to more formal domain-specific education — at least if they want to create.

In short, I think there is a roadmap to getting luck on our side, and I think this is it.

See full article.

Age and Creativity

Marc Andreessen (who is often wrong but never in doubt) has this detailed but very informative post on the relationship between our age and our “output”. Excerpt:

So what have we learned in a nutshell?

* Generally, productivity — output — rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.

* This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.

* Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. “Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit.” High producers produce highly, systematically, over time.

* The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one’s career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity — taking more swings at the bat — is much higher payoff than trying to improve one’s batting average.

* Intelligence, at least as measured by metrics such as IQ, is largely irrelevant.

So here’s my first challenge: to anyone who has an opinion on the role of age and entrepreneurship — see if you can fit your opinion into this model!

Found: here.

And after reading the full article. you should also check out Naval Ravikant’s follow-up to this article which manages to add more interesting thoughts to this topic. Well worth spending the time required to read these long articles.