Ask Successful People of HN: What influenced your personal growth the most? | Hacker News Reader

Ask Successful People of HN: What influenced your personal growth the most?

19 pointskyro2 comments

I want this directed at those that have a net worth of at least $3 million. While that's by no means a definition of success, my question is geared towards achieving financial freedom.

Assuming many of you were once at a stage where you knew little about starting a business, striking deals, and leading a team, what, in your opinion, are the most influential books, quotes, stories, etc, that contributed greatly to your development into a person fit for success?

Swombat wrote a comment here a few weeks ago in which he said "successful companies come out of successful people", and from that point on I've been thinking about how one would become a successful person, or in other words, how one would prepare oneself to increase the chances of being in a position to lead a successful business. I thought it'd be of great value to me and others here if we heard from financially successful people of this community on what they credit as being the main reasons that helped them grow into being "successful people".

Books, anecdotes, a mentor's advice on everything from personal improvement to business mechanics are welcome.

Watching, learning and forever re-thinking.

I was at AOL from 1989 to 2001. When I started, there were 150 employees, and a month later, we had one of those "Look around you - everyone you don't see isn't here anymore" layoffs. When I left, there were 10,000 employees, not counting the 90K cable techs at Time Warner. In between, I learned more than any MBA course could teach, because I saw everything we did right - and everything we did wrong.

As time went on, I got to revisit our old mistakes in a new light. Business books are best read years after the fact, when you can see which predictions hit their mark and which were passing fads. A decade later, I'm still gaining new understandings into why we were bound to fail, business-wise, and what technical leaps we made that would still be useful today. (Hey, turns out multiplexed connections ARE more efficient! Hi, SPDY.)

There are three ways to understand what makes a city tick: Study its history, ask a realtor, or live there. When you live there, you have less formal, analytical knowledge, but you also have an intuitive sense of how things work. That intuition is gold.

So really, I'd just recommend getting a job someplace that grows into a multi-billion dollar global megacorporation - and keep notes. Hindsight is 20/20, and history repeats itself. That's a winning freaking formula right there.

Also, mail everyone CDs, and be sure to get Apple to pay you to develop a service and then pay you to discontinue it. Twice.

Create wealth: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

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