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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

I really hate those kind of content. Would you listen to someone who built a wall which collapsed ? nope

But you will tell me, if I can prevent the mistakes other made I will go further than them. Well I'm not so sure, for any mistake that someone thought they made there will be another person who identify this mistake as something which made them succeed.

These kind of articles are just porn for people who are not putting enough hours in working toward their ideas. (And top x things that made us successful is as stupid)

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Sure the first 65% is work hard. But guess what? The last 35% is a much different ask that just does not succumb to that same hammer.

As the immediate parent implies, wall building is not all or nothing. Even in statistically controlled manufacturing processes there is std deviation. Not learning from mistakes is itself a kind of arrogance. In fact the preferred model is neither arrogant rejection or passive adoption. To use an a sort of Bhuddist analogy, we listen carefully and extract the gold from the gold+useless ore in the wisdom we hear and refashion it into our own art. This requires decent teachers (suppliers of know how) but also decent students who are interested in real learning not passive regurgitation. Making our own art is demonstration of mastery and of appropriate internalization. It avoids the silly extremes of man as an island and man as an empty if pious vessel to be filled with rhetoric that we can grandstand on.

Those of us in profitable and large organizations will see the same truths about market acceptance and customer approval in a modified way: often our organizations are too sterile and inward looking. Losing the customer starts slow but in that last quarter or two accelerates fast often with a profound finality to it.

> I really hate those kind of content. Would you listen to someone who built a wall which collapsed ? nope

What if you knew that 90% of the walls built collapses. Would you listen?

If you just listen to the 10% that achieved it, it just a matter of putting more hours: Now you are in survivorship-bias land.

Yes, we all hate that success is a combination of talent + work + luck (aka random stuff we don't know and don't control).

> These kind of articles are just porn for people who are not putting enough hours

there is also success-porn.

Yeah I feel like these articles always end up coming up with apple pie positions. Like talking to customers more is good advice probably but it’s also the most common most stated advice for early startups.

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