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I don't think "focus on getting lucky" is quite right either. I didn't sift through all the available opportunities and choose changing education. I was person

I don't think "focus on getting lucky" is quite right either. I didn't sift through all the available opportunities and choose changing education. I was personally interested in this problem - it mattered to me on an emotional level. I've interviewed Evan Williams and Mark Zuckerberg personally and I see the same pattern there. It kind of sucks to say "You just need to be interested personally in solving a problem" but it's true. I don't think you can simply identify a problem and solve it, without the personal passion.

nostrademons 12y ago
Maybe this is a quirk of my personality, but I'm interested personally in solving a lot of problems. From what I saw of Larry Page's decision-making when I was at Google, this was true of him as well. From there, it's a matter of choosing the intersection of that set with the set of problems that many other people want solved and the set of problems that you personally have the ability to make a dent in right now. Business books like to talk about the "hedgehog" principle: http://ilead.byuh.edu/node/133 http://ilead.byuh.edu/node/133 This is what it means in practice. It helps if all of the sets are relatively large, and the intersection is quite narrowly focused. Usually when I've had "small" successes (projects beloved by a handful of users, but not enough to make any money), it's because I was following my passion but not considering how many other people cared about the problem. When I've had outright failures (like the graveyard of projects that I never completed), it was when I followed my passion for a project that large amounts of people would want, but didn't pay any attention to whether the problem was tractable with the resources I had available to me.
- ryancarson 12y ago
  Interesting that you were at Google. What did you do there? I'm just finishing "I'm Feeling Lucky" about Google's early days.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    I was in Search from 2009-2014. Worked on a bunch of projects - 3 visual redesigns, the Authorship program, some miscellaneous infrastructure & internal research projects, 3 interactive homepage doodles, about 1/3 of the easter eggs you see on Wikipedia's list of Google easter eggs, loaned out to GFiber and G+ for their launches, a few other things. It was already a big company by the time I got there, but I had the pleasure of working with several folks who'd been there since it was just a couple hundred people. It was also a pretty interesting time in its history - the first half of my tenure was when Bing was still considered a scary competitor, so we pushed out a lot of innovations in a short time period - and I straddled the Eric Schmidt / Larry Page CEO turnover, so had experience under both CEOs.
    - ryancarson 12y ago
      You should blog about it!
      - nostrademons 12y ago
        Some day, maybe. For now, I'm much more focused on getting my next great adventure off the ground (which I'm also not really seeking publicity for...my cofounder and I are trying to go directly to target users for feedback and not the general public). Plus, one thing I learned at Google is that there are a large number of employees that do awesome work without seeking credit for it...I was happy to be one of them at the time, and I don't really want to steal the limelight from them.
pinkyand 12y ago
Maybe for some people, their passion lies in money/fame/etc ,but they see very clearly how attacking said opportunity would lead to those, and it gives them enough "passion" and motivation?
- ryancarson 12y ago
  I pity someone who is 'passionate' about those things.
  - r12s 12y ago
    Yeah, me too. While I'm at it, really loved the post, made me smile (a lot). So you're "fourth time lucky" ;-)
  - tedks 12y ago
    Such an arrogant attitude. As if you'd be working on what you're working on if it didn't get you money or power. One is the other, really. No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end. The truly powerful people in the world -- the ones whose names you don't know, because they don't particularly care for your knowing them -- they never lie to themselves, and they probably know exactly where their passions are. The less powerful people, the Jeff Bezos's and the Larry Ellisons, they probably learned over time. The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game.
    - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
      > No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end. If you're going to be that reductionist, then you're still wrong. The basic evolutionary drive behind our species, and all others, is to reproduce and spread your genes. Everything else stems, however circuitously, from redirected or misdirected reproductive drive. But either way, you're being silly. For example, I want to make enough money to support myself and afford a few luxuries now and then, and have as much free time as possible to spend with friends, books, and games. It's not technically incorrect to say that I want power (over my life and environment), but to say that my motivations are identical to those of a senator or a billionaire is ridiculous. > The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game. See, here's your problem, speaking of delusion. You've let the people playing the game of power trick you into thinking that their game is the only one in town.
toomuchtodo 12y ago
> I don't think you can simply identify a problem and solve it, without the personal passion. Sam Altman indicates this is true in his first lecture at Stanford's startup course.
- coralreef 12y ago
  Interesting contrast to PG's earlier convention of "the idea doesn't matter as much as the founders because the idea can/will change".
- fivedogit 12y ago
  Oh I think you absolutely can. In 2002-3 I worked at a PR firm in DC and identified a shortcoming we were experiencing regarding broadcast TV monitoring. I quit my job, built a distributed TV ingestion system + SaaS interface and signed 75 customers to paying subscriptions over the course of a few years. Did I have any "passion" for broadcast monitoring? Absolutely not. I merely had a passion for starting a successful business.

nostrademons 12y ago

Maybe this is a quirk of my personality, but I'm interested personally in solving a lot of problems. From what I saw of Larry Page's decision-making when I was at Google, this was true of him as well. From there, it's a matter of choosing the intersection of that set with the set of problems that many other people want solved and the set of problems that you personally have the ability to make a dent in right now. Business books like to talk about the "hedgehog" principle: http://ilead.byuh.edu/node/133 http://ilead.byuh.edu/node/133 This is what it means in practice. It helps if all of the sets are relatively large, and the intersection is quite narrowly focused. Usually when I've had "small" successes (projects beloved by a handful of users, but not enough to make any money), it's because I was following my passion but not considering how many other people cared about the problem. When I've had outright failures (like the graveyard of projects that I never completed), it was when I followed my passion for a project that large amounts of people would want, but didn't pay any attention to whether the problem was tractable with the resources I had available to me.

ryancarson 12y ago
Interesting that you were at Google. What did you do there? I'm just finishing "I'm Feeling Lucky" about Google's early days.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  I was in Search from 2009-2014. Worked on a bunch of projects - 3 visual redesigns, the Authorship program, some miscellaneous infrastructure & internal research projects, 3 interactive homepage doodles, about 1/3 of the easter eggs you see on Wikipedia's list of Google easter eggs, loaned out to GFiber and G+ for their launches, a few other things. It was already a big company by the time I got there, but I had the pleasure of working with several folks who'd been there since it was just a couple hundred people. It was also a pretty interesting time in its history - the first half of my tenure was when Bing was still considered a scary competitor, so we pushed out a lot of innovations in a short time period - and I straddled the Eric Schmidt / Larry Page CEO turnover, so had experience under both CEOs.
  - ryancarson 12y ago
    You should blog about it!
    - nostrademons 12y ago
      Some day, maybe. For now, I'm much more focused on getting my next great adventure off the ground (which I'm also not really seeking publicity for...my cofounder and I are trying to go directly to target users for feedback and not the general public). Plus, one thing I learned at Google is that there are a large number of employees that do awesome work without seeking credit for it...I was happy to be one of them at the time, and I don't really want to steal the limelight from them.

pinkyand 12y ago

Maybe for some people, their passion lies in money/fame/etc ,but they see very clearly how attacking said opportunity would lead to those, and it gives them enough "passion" and motivation?

ryancarson 12y ago
I pity someone who is 'passionate' about those things.
- r12s 12y ago
  Yeah, me too. While I'm at it, really loved the post, made me smile (a lot). So you're "fourth time lucky" ;-)
- tedks 12y ago
  Such an arrogant attitude. As if you'd be working on what you're working on if it didn't get you money or power. One is the other, really. No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end. The truly powerful people in the world -- the ones whose names you don't know, because they don't particularly care for your knowing them -- they never lie to themselves, and they probably know exactly where their passions are. The less powerful people, the Jeff Bezos's and the Larry Ellisons, they probably learned over time. The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game.
  - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    > No human alive doesn't want power. That's the basic evolutionary fuel of our entire species. There's no other desire humans even have -- anything else is just a means to that end. If you're going to be that reductionist, then you're still wrong. The basic evolutionary drive behind our species, and all others, is to reproduce and spread your genes. Everything else stems, however circuitously, from redirected or misdirected reproductive drive. But either way, you're being silly. For example, I want to make enough money to support myself and afford a few luxuries now and then, and have as much free time as possible to spend with friends, books, and games. It's not technically incorrect to say that I want power (over my life and environment), but to say that my motivations are identical to those of a senator or a billionaire is ridiculous. > The people who think they do what they do for any other reason are deluding themselves about the game that they're playing. There's only one game. See, here's your problem, speaking of delusion. You've let the people playing the game of power trick you into thinking that their game is the only one in town.

toomuchtodo 12y ago

> I don't think you can simply identify a problem and solve it, without the personal passion. Sam Altman indicates this is true in his first lecture at Stanford's startup course.

coralreef 12y ago
Interesting contrast to PG's earlier convention of "the idea doesn't matter as much as the founders because the idea can/will change".
fivedogit 12y ago
Oh I think you absolutely can. In 2002-3 I worked at a PR firm in DC and identified a shortcoming we were experiencing regarding broadcast TV monitoring. I quit my job, built a distributed TV ingestion system + SaaS interface and signed 75 customers to paying subscriptions over the course of a few years. Did I have any "passion" for broadcast monitoring? Absolutely not. I merely had a passion for starting a successful business.