Why obsessively following successful people online is dangerous

https://durmonski.com/life-advice/following-people-online-is-dangerous/

by durmonski • 5 years ago

285 132 5 years ago

durmonski.com

durmonski• 5 years ago

Following more and more people leads to more time wasted.

kritiko• 5 years ago

What exactly is it that you do?

I must say, I'm envious of "thought leaders" but the net result seems to always lead back to "create your own knowledge product and sell it to other people."

slightwinder• 5 years ago

Isn't everything done obsessively dangerous?

philwelch• 5 years ago

Yeah, it kind of reminds me of when they used to say we shouldn't panic about the coronavirus. Of course you shouldn't panic, because panic isn't a productive response, but you should anticipate, prepare for, and mitigate risks.

Of course, then the people who told us not to panic about the coronavirus ended up panicking about the coronavirus because when they said "don't panic", they meant, "ignore the problem until you are overwhelmed by it", which is exactly what leads people to panic in the first place.

ducktective• 5 years ago

What about reading on all the cool things people create on HN?

adolph• 5 years ago

There's some fine print at the bottom about patio11 being ok.

lbriner• 5 years ago

People mostly don't know how to measure advice. You ask one person and they tell you "it's all about marketing", someone else will say that "technical excellence is more important than anything else". Even though a lot of advice is contradictory and very context-dependent, people don't notice this and lap it up.

The truth is that probably most successful people can't tell luck, serendipity and hard-work from wisdom. Times change, opportunities change etc. so how much is advice really worth?

The only good advice is an answer to a specific question with very clear boundaries: "How much is a good amount to spend on Facebook advertising?", "If you have a product aimed at the mass market and you can correlate success of click-throughs, spend as much as you want as long as it's less than what you make per-click".

Otherwise you get stuff like, "Facebook is great value for money" or "Facebook is a disaster" both useless pieces of advice.

I also suspect that those with the correct brain for business probably don't need very much advice because they will quickly work things out themselves.

mattgreenrocks• 5 years ago

The "learn the secrets of how $SUCCESSFUL_PERSON did $SUCCESSFUL_THING!" is almost always garbage content. Despite that, it's a massive, massive "industry," that will never die.

Once you see the extent of the Matthew Effect [1], it's hard to unsee it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

samhw2• 5 years ago

The other problem is that there's no reason to assume $SUCCESSFUL_PERSON even knows what made them successful. I was once hanging out with a friend of a friend who was pretty successful in finance, and he said he could no more explain how he succeeded than I could explain how to ride a bike. These things are often tacit knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge), or 'unknown knowns'.

In that friend's view - and I think mine too - that's the reason why 'how I succeeded' books by people like Warren Buffett or Bill Ackman almost always turn out to be total dross. Not because they don't want to share their secrets (after all, their secrets would require so much capital to apply as to be impracticable for most) – just that they have no idea.

They do know it, at least on some level. For many of them, they could do it again if they had to. They simply aren't consciously aware. (Like Auden once said: "I knew it all the time, but I never realised it before!")

ask_b123• 5 years ago

Reminds me of this essay by Chesterton (The Fallacy of Success): http://web.archive.org/web/20200216164109/http://www.gkc.org...

andrepd• 5 years ago

It is indeed an old phenomenon: https://www.commonlit.org/texts/the-fallacy-of-success

imtringued3• 5 years ago

I once have heard the phrase "the poor have every reason to work". Why not let them?

I know its overly simplistic but isn't the reason why the Matthew effect exists that we deny opportunities to poor people? If there are opportunities that make people not poor then shouldn't we allocate them to the poor first?

lukewrites• 5 years ago

There's a joke a rabbi I admire likes to tell to illustrate how random "success" is.

He was watching the news and they interviewed the richest man in Canada. The interviewer asked, "How did you make your fortune?"

"Well, when I came to Canada, I had nothing but five cents. I used those five cents to buy an apple. I sold the apple for ten cents, and then bought two apples to sell. I sold those apples for twenty cents, and then I got a telegram that my uncle had died and left me three billion dollars."

xorfish9• 5 years ago

The truth is that probably most successful people can't tell luck, serendipity and hard-work from wisdom. Times change, opportunities change etc. so how much is advice really worth?

The ability to work hard is also always 100% luck.

Humans do not control their DNA or what environment shaped them to be able and have the desire to work hard.

CivBase• 5 years ago

Are there any credible studies demonstrating a strong link between genetics and motivation/drive/work-ethic? I don't doubt that DNA plays a part, but I'm hesitant to accept claims that it's 100% genetic.

nsonha7• 5 years ago

Is this just a thrown away observation or meant to be some sort of insight?

Determinism isn't exactly useful as a personal guideline, or anything. So I don't know why some people keep digging that hole.

pier255• 5 years ago

It's an interesting point but I don't think it's valid.

1) We still don't really understand the effects of DNA on human behavior.

2) Environment is influential, but it's an influence not something that shapes you in stone forever and ever. Plus, there are all sorts of characters from all sorts of environments.

I'm sure there are some exceptions, but I'd say it mostly comes down to a personal decision to nurture willpower.

imtringued3• 5 years ago

I consider hard work to be a lazy substitute for figuring out what you want to do. Just fill your day with busy hard work and you don't have to think about what you want to do. If you knew what you wanted you wouldn't have to work so hard and even the hard work you have to do wouldn't feel very hard compared to what you want.

bena• 5 years ago

Success is multifaceted. If there's a formula or equation for success, it's a combination of luck, talent, work ethic, and several other things. And not to mention every facet is fungible with every other facet.

If you're lucky enough, talent and work ethic matter less. If you're talented enough, maybe you don't need as much luck. Etc. But for the vast majority, there's going to be a combination.

I think that's what people don't truly get. You can work as hard as possible, but you do need a little luck to get that work noticed.

k__• 5 years ago

this.

I'm a dev/tech blogger, and I can say, following the right people is half of the success.

Not just because of the things they say, but because they can share your work.

Every time my work was shared by an influencer in the field, I got one or multiple job/project offers and over the years I made a good living out of it.

"being good at tech" only helps in the next step, when you need to proof that you can write better about a tech topic than the average marketeer/content creator.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 years ago

I've noticed that people are uncomfortable with nuance.

WalterBright8• 5 years ago

Some advice that actually works is:

Take responsibility for things that happen to you. Taking responsibility means you can do something about it if it isn't what you want.

Assigning responsibility to others means there's nothing you can do about your situation.

LurkingPenguin• 5 years ago

There are some interesting observations here, but the piece basically ends up in the same place all self-help content ends up: here are the x things you should do.

Instead of just watching, reading, listening to other people doing fancy stuff. We need to get going. Overcome the general feeling of malaise by start running, failing, getting up, and trying again.

This is basically the same advice that a lot of self-help gurus give. The only difference is in the packaging.

Here's a tangential piece of advice about listening to "successful people online": not everything is as it appears. In fact, much of the time these days, it isn't. Never forget that you have no way of knowing whether people are as happy, rich, etc. as they say they are, and even if they are, you have no way of knowing whether or not the advice they're selling you is how they got to where they are.

yupper32• 5 years ago

The title doesn't really match the advice.

The advice is separate from the number of successful people you follow online. The advice is simply to follow through with the tips you see from the successful people you follow with some tips on how to do that. Very meta.

I do find a bunch of irony in the dissing of self-help books, when you could copy-paste this entire article verbatim into like half the self-help books out of there and it'd fit right in.

randycupertino• 5 years ago

I have a friend who is going through a harrowing divorce, cheating on both sides, lots of family drama, she tried to light his car on fire, police called by neighbors for fighting, etc.

On Instagram he and his (soon to be ex) wife just tagged themselves this weekend putting up Halloween decorations, all smiley buying pumpkins and cooking truffle mac and cheese, liking each other's posts.

Meanwhile he is calling me at 1:30am asking if he can come sleep on our couch. I kind of want to ask him about the discrepancy between his online persona vs real life, but I don't want to offend him.

bhouston• 5 years ago

Perfect Instagram is a skill you can deploy and unrelated to whether you are actually happy. Case in point: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/09/16/police-compare-notes/. There were multiple photogenic posts of smiling people in the weeks leading up to the murder, when they were fighting a lot of the time.

tombert• 5 years ago

Obviously I don't know your friend, but as someone who has dealt with depression and whatnot constantly for most of my life, and intermittently since I started medication four years ago, I can tell you that it's not terribly hard to make yourself seem happy and content online.

It's almost easier to appear happy online when you know you're not; you don't want people to try and offer you unsolicited advice about how "exercise worked for them" or "changing to this particular diet changed my life" or crap like that, so you fake it [1]. You only post things that you think are interesting, you minimize how much you talk about your personal life, and when you do it's only to flex about something cool you did. Whenever I did open up to friends later about my mental health stuff, they were always really surprised to hear it, and that was by design.

[1] To be clear, I'm not knocking diet and exercise. If you're feeling depressed, eating healthier and getting regular exercise is probably the best (and cheapest) place to start, and offers a bunch of other benefits too. My life did improve when I stopped eating Taco Bell ever day.

vmception4• 5 years ago

I mute people's posts and stories when their content is primarily rants, resharing some kind of social justice issue, resharing meme accounts, their children. So yeah I probably would not entertain a depressing couple’s spiral for more than a few 15 second clips. They know that too.

I’m only interested in the outgoing and interesting things, inspiration about locations or events, things that could include me. When these things really seem like they will never happen I typically remove them as followers and unfollow them. (Its much easier to curate your social graph as you go, instead of waking up one day and finding it too hard to fix your feed by attempting to unfollow lots of people)

I like to know people personally and I do that in person or over direct message

I only use the story for entertainment personally

Like someone else mentioned, I don't find many people’s online persona that interesting, and I have abruptly deactivated and/or deleted my own profiles before. Periodic curating has been good for me.

hunterb1235• 5 years ago

Why would you want him to put his drama online?

Most people want to deal with their shit internally.

I guess the wife could have put the picture of the burning car or a snap of an affair sex tape, but then they'd both have more drama to deal with from people contacting them trying to "fix" things.

Intimate moments are private, happy moments are okay for public. Bad moments can be used against you so you keep them private.

AlexandrB• 5 years ago

I think the the point of the anecdote is that what you see online in no way reflects people's actual struggles. If you try to compare your real self against someone's online persona you will never measure up.

Unfortunately this fact is not made explicit anywhere - I can imagine the self-loathing Facebook or Instagram would have generated in my naive, socially-inept, teenage self.

psyc• 5 years ago

One of the reasons I quit FB was I didn’t recognize my close friends’ online personas. It was too bizarro-world for me. If I asked them about it, they felt attacked. So it turned out I simply preferred not to know what they were up to online.

nsonha7• 5 years ago

On the flip side who knows what is real. Some people prob feel freer to be themselves online (cough...millennials...cough)

nradov• 5 years ago

Before Instagram, many families would send out Christmas update letters to all their friends and relatives full of almost entirely happy news. Then you'd hear about the pending divorce a few months later. People haven't changed.

SV_BubbleTime• 5 years ago

Meanwhile he is calling me at 1:30am asking if he can come sleep on our couch. I kind of want to ask him about the discrepancy between his online persona vs real life, but I don't want to offend him.

In my house we call this 'Hashtag Blessed".

Because the people we know that write posts with #Blessed are the ones with a completely different reality online.

One dude is sleeping in his camper parked at work because wife saw a screen shot of pornhub on his phone (seriously Apple, so many accidental screen shots weren't a problem when the power button was on top), she's telling him he's cheating on her, and there was a couple in the picture, but the guy was clearly exposed, so while she's having a fit of over this and kicking him out she's seriously asking him if "Like, are you gay now!?"... Next day they need to do some cubscouts events, so it's smile #Blessed.

PragmaticPulp3• 5 years ago

I kind of want to ask him about the discrepancy between his online persona vs real life, but I don't want to offend him.

Struggling people are allowed to have, and share, enjoyable moments. Going through a divorce doesn't mean someone must be miserable 100% of the time, nor that you have to hate your spouse. Nobody is obligated to share the negative parts of their relationships and lives online, even if they're struggling.

Having a perfectly happy and problem-free marriage isn't a prerequisite for posting a happy family photo online with your kids. Nor should it be!

I don't understand why this is even a question. Just support your friend. Don't try to poke fun at the one moment of joy he shared online or call him out for some perceived discrepancy just because you know his struggles. It's not hypocritical for someone to have fun while going through tough times. It's bizarre that you'd even consider asking someone about this.

deft• 5 years ago

Just support your friend JUST

well, he is supporting him. Wondering what's going on mentally is part of that. I don't understand why this is even posed as a solution.

nsonha7• 5 years ago

I can only guess but as an average person I do have this fear of showing the slightest negativity can drive people away.

The person might not be vain, it's just we're all trapped in this system of toxic positivity & unrealistic expectation created by social media.

giantg2• 5 years ago

I stopped following a bunch of people on LinkedIn. It seemed like all they did was repost stuff from others - mostly infographics. None of the information was even helpful to an IC like me.

jordanmorgan10• 5 years ago

TL;DR Seems to be the old adage since the early days of self-help content: Don't dwell, do.

hidden-spyder• 5 years ago

I'm having trouble understanding that adage. Would you please elaborate on it?

bryceacc• 5 years ago

dwelling would be thinking about doing things. People often get caught up in the research portion of vacations or hobbies and they just watch videos and read articles about it or scroll through hashtags of the subject on twitter or instagram but never actually get about doing the task.

So don't think about doing it, actually go out and do it

marcodiego2• 5 years ago

Possible more relevant hypothesis: Why Obsessively Following People Is Dangerous.

munk-a4• 5 years ago

Or an even more general one: Why Obsessing Over Vicarious Actions is Dangerous.

Everyone needs to live their own life and do what's right for them. Whether your life looks like your glamorous neighbors or not shouldn't matter to you.

snvzz2• 5 years ago

The essence:

obsessively --> dangerous.

marcodiego2• 5 years ago

Hmmm... I don't know... Being obsessive for a short periods of time may be even required to reach some high achievements.

My fingers bled, but I learned "Tico-tico no fubá".

georgewsinger• 5 years ago

I have the opposite complaint of OP (though technically orthogonal to his point). I'm extremely annoyed at having to sift through the thousands upon thousands of self-help tidbits and life tip nuggets that fledgling VCs and founders -- who have accomplished *literally nothing whatsoever* once you round down -- offer on social media platforms. I'm talking about people who have written 100 small checks, but who haven't hit even a single grand slam. Or entrepreneurs who built an incremental SaaS business and got acquihired 5 years ago, and think that people need to hear their hot takes about success and life. It's extremely annoying.

On the other hand, I really enjoy the occasional pieces of fluff and advice offered by, e.g., the true outliers (e.g., the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels walking among us; the people have have actually come into contact with reality and accomplished non-trivial things that are very hard to repeat and generalize from). Not just tech billionaires; I think the same for the comparably successful scientists and technologists.

These people can't give you cookie cutter formulas for success other than "try to break other formulas". It's still inspirational, IMO, and far preferable coming from them than the phonies on Twitter seeking validation and fame.

sylens• 5 years ago

I was excited to click through to this but was a little disappointed when I read it because it wasn't discussing what I was hoping for.

I think there's also an issue where you can follow a bunch of people that are already very successful and at the top of their fields on Twitter; they comment on the latest news, post their big conference talks, their brand new tool on Github, etc. You may have had a very unproductive day (or week) at work, and seeing these other people continue to ascend and excel makes you feel like you are not working hard enough. If only you picked up that new front-end framework. If only you went and got another certification. If only you created your own side hustle and turned it into a profitable business.

There are benefits to surrounding yourself with motivated, successful people - it can also create and foster a drive in you. But it's also important that you can relax and take the night off after work , even if you're not keeping pace with the most vocal and prominent avatars.

iratewizard• 5 years ago

And here I thought that following successful people was the one obsessive behavior that wasn't dangerous. Thank you for your blog spam.

iainctduncan• 5 years ago

I stopped reading after the fifth one sentence paragraph or so. Author needs to stop reading successful bloggers telling them how to write for the internet. It just seemed to me like the article style was a symptom of the problem it was supposedly about.

That kind of writing

is so bloody annoying

please read some books

and then write more.

robohoe• 5 years ago

This maybe just an anecdotal conjecture, but I've noticed this a lot lately with many news sites. It seems that with the advent of social media and smart phones, our attention spans have drastically shortened. Now all the articles have paragraphs that are 2-3 sentences long.

Wistar• 5 years ago

In between which are often gratuitous photos and ads.

danuker• 5 years ago

I am also guilty of this. Can you give me an example of a blogpost you enjoyed reading?

0des• 5 years ago

London Review of Books has quite a few.

xmprt• 5 years ago

I agree. I don't even mind short paragraphs because I think they can be used for good effect but not if it's every single paragraph.

It just strikes me as lazy writing. If each sentence is its own paragraph then you don't have to worry about structuring the article well or writing transitions or intro/outro sentences.

tonyedgecombe• 5 years ago

It’s called broetry.

mikeInAlaska• 5 years ago

Why Obsessively Following Successful People Online Is Dangerous

Facebook Network Admins Are Doing Their Part To Reduce The Risk

wolverine876• 5 years ago

Here's a reason that seems obvious to me: Cults of personality are dangerous, for cult members and for the community. Among other things, they are delusional; they aren't reality. Also, they give far too much power to the personality.

Why has that obvious knowledge been forgotten? Have we forgotten to be skeptical?

raspasov4• 5 years ago

Don’t listen to what successful people say. Watch what they do.

Underphil• 5 years ago

Which in many cases is morally questionable or downright illegal.

raspasov4• 5 years ago

Sorry, I don’t follow. How is the act of observing illegal? I’m not advocating for getting access to private information.

quickthrower2• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the Genesis - Jesus He Knows Me song. Actually those lyrics pretty much sum this all up :-).

theyx2• 5 years ago

And watch what their family has done to put them in the condition they are today. Most rich people are rich because of inheritance.

raspasov4• 5 years ago

Simply receiving an inheritance does not qualify as success, IMO.

pdimitar2• 5 years ago

Sorry to interject with something more generic but I feel it's somewhat pertinent. And sorry for the gray beard tone. Here it comes:

---

Obsessively following anything or anyone is not good for you and that's very likely a 99% universal advice.

I was super good at multi-tasking all my life... until 2-3 years ago my brain started resisting me and sabotaging me at every turn. Gradually I realized that I am gulping waaaaaaaay too much information online; not just HN but favourite forums like ElixirForum, Rust Users, OCaml, and a few very big subreddits on top of that.

Starting to gradually dial down things did wonders. Even today I still insist on checking 2 outlets from the above listing and I am working on eliminating my fear of missing out. So far a good compromise has been to never check them during this or that hours. And even that helps.

---

Here's something even more generic as an advice but I also feel it applies well, especially nowadays with all the distractions that bombard us:

Do your own thing. Develop problem-solving skills. All the out-of-context advice is still out there. If one day you need it, you can get metric tons of it in minutes.

Start focusing. Start analyzing your own life, your own personal / work faults, and optimize for your own unique circumstances. Treat your life (or whatever part of it you want improved) as an optimization problem and work on that.

data_required• 5 years ago

Lovely practical comment, seems almost universally applicable, thank you :). Especially this bit:

If one day you need it, you can get metric tons of it in minutes.

SkyBelow• 5 years ago

Obsessively following anything or anyone is not good for you and that's very likely a 99% universal advice.

I think the problem with reducing the advice to this level is that it reduces away the idea that some information is much less healthy than other information.

When you follow other people online, you are always learning from the information you gather. The problem is that you aren't always aware of what you are learning. If one is constantly following very successful people, they are learning how filled with the success the life of others are. This begins to contrast the lack of success in their own life. Not that their life lacks any success, but it isn't filled with only success. You get a false impression of the life of others which results in an unhealthy judgment of your own life.

This can become a significant problem on social media and one that I've seen brought up before in regards to teens and instagram. The older one is the more life experience and other sources of learning one has and thus the less susceptible to the effect, but less susceptible doesn't mean immune.

In contrast there is a flood of other information that isn't as toxic. Follow your favorite hobby by someone who shows both their success and failures and you don't risk building the same unrealistic picture. Follow a bunch of information largely freed from daily grind, like watching videos that dig into math, history, and science and you would have even less risk. That's not to say you can just assume the information has no risks at all, addiction and such are still a concern, but short of some very specific scenarios I would find it much safer to consume.

It is like telling someone to not overeat. While that's good advice, it is important to make sure the person you are talking to understands that overeating refined sugar and fats are much more a threat than overeating vegetables. Such an example almost feels silly because of how common sense the information feels, but when it comes to following people and information sources online I find people aren't as well informed as to what is the deep fried refined sugar and what is the vitamin packed fiber.

pdimitar2• 5 years ago

Oh, true. I also started hesitatingly following some specialized blogs and forums and that was good for my mental health.

And yep, people very easily miss nuance.

pm903• 5 years ago

This is an interesting concept. I wonder if there is some way of quantifying the toxicity of media just like we quantify that of food. Or something like the “Nutrition Facts” label that we see on foods but on media, list the effects along various parameters that might affect someone’s mental health.

lewdev• 5 years ago

Excellent comment!

Do your own thing.

The article points out "A delusion is created that progress is made." and I agree that consuming content should not be mistaken for progress, rather you should also actively act on the content you consume. Create something out of it.

WalterBright8• 5 years ago

When I go on trips, I don't go online. It's interesting that I don't miss it.

ssimoni• 5 years ago

I think the reason to not follow successful people online is that they did not get successful by following successful people online.

Meaning - they have a big online presence post-success. They use the online presence to bask in their own glory.

But this isn’t just for the sake of basking in ones glory. It is a sort of way for the successful person to leverage their success into more success. A positive feedback loop of sorts.

paxys• 5 years ago

Another thing this doesn't touch upon is – what made these online "influencers" successful in the first place? Was it following all the advice that they love to dole out on Twitter and LinkedIn? Or the fact that they got lucky with a tech investment and/or were at the right place at the right time? The tech world is full of these personalities. Ultimately most of them (and the rest of us) are monkeys throwing darts. Some get lucky, others don't.

Why obsessively following successful people online is dangerous

Related Stories