Hacker News Reader

My personal feeling as an early-30s who has seen numerous "impossible" projects come and go is that it does help to know what has come before you and to have an idea of why you're going to avoid the way your previous people failed. From what I can see, when people who didn't know "it" is impossible succeed, it isn't because of tenacity or persistence per se, it's because they, in their ignorance of the accepted "right way" to do it, end up trying something new that ends up working.

And of course it should be pointed out that the way it becomes accepted wisdom that "it" is impossible is usually young idealistic people who don't know it is impossible trying it and failing repeatedly. The narrative that you can overcome that sort of problem by sheer persistence is very tempting but also very dangerous; you can lose years, decades, or even entire careers trying to follow it.

As a concrete example, one that comes up a lot and I try to offer a, err, "calming" voice on is the persistent idea that there should be some sort of purely-visual programming language. The advice I offer is not "don't do it"; the advice I offer is go out and look at the immense amounts of work already done, learn why they failed, then explain why you will not suffer from the exact same problems and fail in the exact same way. If you come up with such an explanation, go for it! No sarcasm, no joke, go for it with my blessing. But this particular area has been richly covered and extensively explored already, and especially if you think you want to make money with this idea it behooves you to take advantage of the nearly-free research you can do simply by looking at others.

After all, you might succeed. Tablets were an "impossible" project pretty recently, until Apple succeeded. Times do change, processor power has continued to get cheaper and cheaper (one of the reasons tablets have succeeded now, IMHO, you can still have a decent experience on them), server infrastructure is cheaper than ever, programming languages have continued their slow-but-steady march towards having more power than ever, etc.

The amount of things that need to be known is infinite. Everyday you learn new things, but 1 + 1 is as far from infinity as 1 is. You've all read what Paul Graham has written about blub programmers? (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html). To some extent, we are all blub programmers, all the time. In Graham's example, there is a programmer who does not know of a powerful programming language that could help them, but if you happen to know the most powerful and perfect programming language in the world, there is still an infinite realm of things you do not know that would be helpful to running a business - facts about accounting, changes in the tax codes in all the different countries where you'd like to operate, the languages spoken by humans in those countries, the culture of those countries, and the changing behaviors among young people, old people, and those in the middle, facts about the law, torts, libel, what is and is not allowed in advertising, facts about management and human relations, dealing with diverse work forces, integrating cross functional teams, the right way to motivate, facts about sales and the psychology that prompts people to buy or not buy, how to close, facts about large organizations, navigating their hierarchy, discovering the right person to contact, facts about personal motivation, avoiding burn out in yourself and in your employees, balancing the changing needs our bodies and minds present us with, facts about larger trends in our industries, facts about whatever chemistry or physics underlies the work we do, and possibly impacts it... I could go on forever, because the list is pretty much infinite.

My point is, we are all infinitely ignorant and therefore we fall into the category of "didn't know that I couldn't do it". I think what matters is ambition. Motivation counts more than knowledge or lack of knowledge. One figures out what one needs to along the way.

I feel like Steve Blank is talking more about how much time people have been in an industry than how old they are. He writes:

"Knowing that “it can’t be done” because you can recount each of the failed attempts in the last 20 years to solve the problem can be a boat anchor on insight and imagination."

This wouldn't really apply to people like me who switch careers when they hit 30. The tech industry was all bright and shiny and new to me when I first took an interest in it at age 31. Steve Blank is conflating age and time spent in an industry.

I agree with this and think it also offers a way to reset. Work in a new field or industry and bring "newcomer's eyes" to the established problems, re-purposing what worked in your original field where appropriate.

"recount each of the failed attempts in the last 20 years to solve the problem can be a boat anchor on insight and imagination"

Anyone who thinks like that should read some Karl Popper on the weaknesses inherent in inductive reasoning.

I'm 45 and I've spent a lot of time persuading folks in their 20s that something is possible - almost always by coming up with a basic implementation of an approach. Honestly, the number of times I've heard "I didn't know you could do that".

Very few things motivate me more than someone asserting "that can't be done".

I'm 45 too, and there is theoretically no 'Can't be done' in my book either. Everything can be done, given enough time and resources.

I like your way of proving that something can be done by demonstrating it with a 'basic implementation'. I prototype a lot too, and I call it 'proofs of concept'. I always do proof-of-concepts when I have to use a new technology to prove to myself and to my customer that it can be done.

Often the reason they have jaded attitudes, is because they did the impossible, and watched others get rewarded for it.

I didn't become jaded. I learnt my lessons -- and promised myself not to let others grab the rewards of my own creativity and efforts. I started and run my own company.

Prometheus won't succeed unless he chooses to unbind himself.

You do realise that this can only happen if your an employee? Where you work your butt off and you still get paid your regular salary even if your product is a huge success in the market.

And in a corporation this is still a minor cause of pain. The politics, stupid rules and pointy haired bosses are a much bigger cause of "jadedness".

I think anyone who starts their own company doesnt have the time to get jaded.

From my observations, it is more common in academia than in business. Most companies try to accurately identify productive people because they are aware of gaming issues, and, when there is an issue of rewards, want to continue benefiting by rewarding the correct person. On the other hand, I have seen several claims that the majority of work "produced" by senior academics was actually done by grad students - though I think their claims of how often it happens are probably exaggerated.

I disagree.

In many, many successful startups, the people who make the money and the people who did the work are only loosely correlated. In particular early employees who were duds get paid well, and later employees who were key to the success get only modest payouts.

You don't think inferior products sometimes win in the marketplace? Ever hear of FUD?

> I think anyone who starts their own company doesnt have the time to get jaded.

Just beware the investors! The less you own, the less control you have.

I'd tend to agree. I only have anecdotal data, but I've definitely met far more "can't-do" people in their 20s and early 30s than those with a "can-do" attitude. Many of the former end up dropping out of the field in some way or another, which should counteract the effect hypothesised in the article to some extent.

I'm also pretty sure lack of experience also stops you from thinking you could do anything, at least up to a certain level. I think it's combinatorics, really. If you've done N wildly different projects, you have O(N²) possibilities of combining the experiences of 2 of those to produce something novel and good. I have a hard time working with people who are too focused in their domain (e.g. nothing but web apps) because they can't think outside their box.

So have I. In fact, most of the "can't do" folks in their 20's and 30's that I've had to deal with were failing to solve easy problems. My peers and I had encountered these in the past, we had solved them, and didn't care to waste time trying to come up with new solutions to them. The ones who failed were too arrogant to listen to the voice of experience, and as a result they failed miserably.

That said, I've also encountered peers who were too set in their ways to change, and continued to fail in almost exactly the same way over and over again, refusing to learn from their own experience.

It goes both ways, but age has had very little to do with it in either case. It's usually been arrogance instead.

I think it's mostly just lack of caring, not arrogance, at least in my experience. Sure, some people react badly when you try to coax them out of their comfort zone. Could be a cultural thing - Americans seem to be more confident overall, which could well manifest itself as arrogance in this situation.

I come across the issue occasionally as a contractor - where my work needs to be integrated with the help of employees who are totally out of their depth with it. In addition to making it all happen you get a second objective: not embarrassing them or otherwise pissing them off.

I think you're right, it does seem like a cultural thing. If you find something that's easy for you, you can choose to either stick with that one thing, or you can push your comfort zone and grow. Most americans these days are trained early on to stay in their comfort zone rather than growing, and it's getting ingrained into them.

I think there's a certain amount of serendipity. However, you'll never find it if you're not searching.

Voted up. This is even stronger than Pasteur's famous, "Chance favors the prepared mind" - if you are not actually working on a problem, there is no possible way to benefit from serendipity.

Visible examples of this in practice are actually legion.

One such is in nature photography, a passion of mine. Back when I was a total newbie, another photographer shared an image during a class on photography. His photograph had, in addition to an excellent composition, a stunning sky, and perfect light.

One person's response to the image was something like, "Wow, you were very lucky to get a sky like that for that shot!"

The photographer explained that it hadn't been luck. He had found the spot already, and knew what he wanted to get, knew what time of day would give him the highest likelihood of getting the right light to match his vision, and kept going back to that spot at the right time until everything came together.

Luck is what happens when experience meets opportunity.

He put himself in the right spot, and had the vision and skills to take advantage of an opportunity that he would not have gotten without being in the right place at the right time.

This concept isn't unique to photography obviously -- it's just more visible. :)

I think it's largely an issue of who has the imagination, and how they weigh the cost benefit. As you get older, that profile shifts radically, so not only are they less available, they are, rightly, more risk averse. But if they have the right idea, and if they see the value as paying off then you get an incredible mix.

When I was younger I thought I couldn't solve the really hard problems because I lacked experience, now that I have some experience I realize it is more about mindset than naivete or ability.