summerlunch

OP, along with people like Tim Ferris claim that publicly announcing your goals will help you achieve them due to the pressure of being known as a failure. At the same time, people like Derek Sivers http://sivers.org/zipit claim that telling others about your goals leads to failure because your brain reaps the award of getting that social identity of that goal, thus not feeling the need to achieve that goal.

At first this looks like conflicting ideas, but it really isn't. It really depends on the goal, how your announce your goals, and the people you announce it to.

You have to tell other people your goals in a way that there will be negative consequences if you do not follow up on it.

If your peers are the forgiving type that will not give you trouble for not following up on your goals, then you will just reap the rewards of that initial attention you get when you announce your goals, but will not feel the pressure of being a failure.

So in the end, it's all about managing the amount of pressure and the urgency you will feel, and reducing the amount of "fake-but-feels-real" rewards that will rob your motivation.

Tips like these really have to be taken in context.

This seems like a pretty big blunder. Every day I grow more and more paranoid about my personal data including HIPAA.

You've misunderstood me. The part I've found motivating was that these seemingly amazing people are also regular people. I'm also more interested in bootstrapping my business without funding so I was never part of "PG's business model" as you would put it.

What a great fucking quote. I remember being totally inspired by this essay. Makes me feel like my dreams are within my reach.

They certainly have the money and the technical talent. Innovation is hard because you need a certain type of insight and creative perspective, which is very rare.

Good to see that he is taking advantage of his sour situation. I think I would have broken down if I were to become a subject of internet ridicule. I am so afraid of fame that everything I do, I want to do it low-key.

Take a person born in the early 90's for an example. They are college students now. Mix their newly found freedom with alcohol and high definition cameras in every student's pocket, and what do you get? Embarrassing pictures and videos that could seriously damage anyone's reputation.

Everyone born in the early 90's have a ticking time bomb in their friend's pockets. You never know which of these embarrassing contents will go viral. We live in the era of Reddit and revenge porn. I wonder if in the future we all become more understanding of each other, and learn to never take things at face value.

This sounds like a different version of smart kids being lazy because they learned that they can get away with it, while those who were taught to work hard as kids become successful.

I'm sure this has been researched intensively by the media giants. A lot of pop music and rehashes of classic movies are a product of this I think.

This is good stuff. Most people know by now that they should "solve business problems" in order to create a decently successful product/service. But most beginning entrepreneurs are struggling to find out exactly what those "business problems" are.

I think the issue for most young entrepreneurs is that we don't have much business-related domain knowledge. Most teens and young adults have domain knowledge related to recreational activities such as skateboarding or playing guitar, but no business knowledge whatsoever.

Maybe we should encourage younger people to participate in business at a younger age so that we can use their fresh creativity towards coming up with new solutions.

Bit of a stretch, but when I read the title, I thought it was going to be a satire about how the main functions of schools now days seems to be social proof and nothing else (PROOF school!).

Pretty much anything you learn in school, you can learn on your own or with a much cheaper tutor. We only go to school so that we can say we have a 'background' on a subject, when really, we went to class hungover or slept through the passionless lectures. The real learning happened in the library when we read the textbooks ourselves.

Kind of what the Soylent guy is going through. He probably knows a lot about biology and human physiology from self-teaching, but because he 'doesn't have a background' (i.e. didn't sit through 4 years of ineffective lectures), society doesn't give him any credibility. I wonder if there is another way we can scale 'proof' without having to go through that waste of time we call college.

Nice! Does Amazon regularly offer free eBooks?

How I felt while watching this speech: 1) Motivation to work harder at my job. 2) Relief that people do develop better tastes in people as they age (i.e. generosity over coolness) 3) Hope that the system isn't as rigid as it seems. That I can find my own success through my own solutions.

I really like this site. It would be perfect if all these items were guarenteed to be sold :p Just because you bought a toilet seat for $20 cheaper on Amazon doesn't mean people will buy them on eBay from some stranger!

Why is everybody saying that this post seems sleazy? Am I the only one that's not seeing it like that? He is only trying to encourage people to attend the BoS conference by telling us about the benefits. How else would you do it?

Oops, I meant phone number!

The concept of curating all the basic knowledge of Rails into 3 hours is interesting, but his sales page does not tell you exactly what he covers. If you are not willing to drop 40 dollars on an unknown product, Michael Hartl's free book is more than good enough for anyone. If you can make a Twitter clone, then you have the basis for making any sort of application.

Posted 17 hours ago. How did it go? Did you get to talk about interesting things?

Wow, now that I see you breaking it down like this, I can start to see how I can find business problems that I can potentially solve.

This is making me think why stop at software solutions? Why not just solve business problems in general, but use Ruby on Rails as a tool to solve them? Maybe some problems won't even need Ruby on Rails!

Another questions comes to mind: how would I sell a service with such unpredictable outcomes? If I sell software, then I can almost guarantee certain features. But if I were to promise "more customers" or "more sales", I wouldn't even be 100% sure myself if my methods will work. How would I market a service with an unpredictable success rate?

Wow okay, to be honest with you, I could not answer that question about the taco truck. But I will try to understand businesses more better. Thank you so much for your helpful answers. My head is now filled with a million more questions. Do you mind if I email you sometime?

Thank you, your reply did help. So I guess you've started as a consultant and then moved into creating your own products?

Okay, your accountant example has made it clear that there is really no obvious way of finding business problems by just merely looking from the outside. Now I guess I should figure out how to expose myself to an industry.

What is your opinion on the effectiveness of speaking to people and asking them directly about their problems? Or am I better off reading industry magazines/blogs/forums and kind of examining them in their natural habitat?

Okay, so use my programming ability as a tool that solves business problems. But that seems a little too abstract. What are some "business problems" that I could solve with RoR? What are some of the ways I could discover them?

I guess California. What kind of technical skills usually tend to be paid the most? Specifically speaking. Is it still machine language and C++? Or can RoR developers demand more than 6 figures?