Work on the most important thing until it's not the most important thing any more.
I have developed this excellent/horrible habit of not being able to focus on very much of anything if there was something more important hanging over my head.
Excellent in keeping me from trivial pursuits. Horrible at meal time, bed time, other people time. I'm still a work in progress.
One thing I've always wanted to ask PG is: does he think that helping smart people to get rich flipping companies (usually not by doing the "coolest thing") is cooler than making a great Lisp? One answer to why not, is: "No money".
The really cool thing about money is that it makes an excellent points system. It's neat that you can trade green paper for physical things, but more importantly money is a way to keep score to two decimal places.
Often times when people talk about money they are talking about resource gathering. At some point the resource gathering turns off and the money becomes an easy proxy for points.
So I'm not sure that creating another Lisp is less cool, but it can't be easily measured. What if IBM uses your Lisp for everything they do, how does that compare to another guys Lisp that has 6.5 million downloads. Who is cooler?
What does this even mean? I assume that you're talking about in a moral sense because of the value judgement you appear to have made.
Of course, when I say 'good' I don't mean in the moral sense. Imagine you were to design a way for people to keep score and they had to use tangible things. What would make one tangle item better than another? Here's a quick list I came up with...
1. Easily transferable. Money fulfills this because it can be transferred electronically. The physical good need not even exist. Money when talking about it as a point system is strictly an abstract. Put another way it is a stored value that can later be redeemed for big macs or Jane Austeen books.
2. It must be difficult to acquire. Money you can't just print (Well you can, but it is mostly worthless). The difficulty makes it more of a way to keep score in the game of life. There needs to be a way to prevent someone from adding to their score arbitrarily.
3. You must be able to keep score at small enough intervals. Keeping score by buying big macs becomes unproductive when you get into the millions of dollar range. At the same time keeping score in the form of luxury cars becomes impossible in the thousands of dollar range.
That's why I said money is good. Not in the moral sense that those who have more money are better people or some form of Prosperity theology. Just that money has many of the traits needed to provide a way to keep score.
No, not really. You said money is "an excellent points system". I inferred that if it was the case, the price of current products sold on the market should reflect well their inherent value, which I think it doesn't.
Money is is too ductile and doesn't involve enough the "donor", a bit like "vote by SMS for your favorite star". The voting system itself is still not involving enough the person giving the vote.
My favorite "point system" is "feet-voting": the best city is the place where people move to, the best country is the one that people want to go to live, raise their kids, etc. This evaluation was used during the Warring State period in China, and it induces the kings and feudal lords to enforce justice and proper retributions. If not, their administrate will move away. Trying to force them to stay by forbidding expatriation will push them away even stronger. And this voting-with-your-life thing is such a deep decision from the voters that we can trust them to ponder long-term consequences.
Granted, this evaluation cannot apply to each and every case, but in the web services it has a clear equivalent in how many users stay on a site and use it.
> if it was the case, the price of current products sold on the market should reflect well their inherent value, which I think it doesn't.
Money is good since it provides a reference point, a solid ground for measurement and comparison. Although often you need to take into account some non-obvious stuff when you compare two amounts of money (esp. prices), it still does work.
For ‘inherent value’ each person would see their own price tag. And I'm sure my tag would reflect smaller amount for Jane Austen's book than yours.
And feet-voting is good if you can judge on a large scale, which is not always applicable. Edit: by the way, most people would feet-vote for a big mac rather than a book (that is, if we were able to conduct a really unbiased experiment with random selection of people).
> most people would feet-vote for a big mac rather than a book
Seriously? If you had to be thrown on a desert island and bring only one thing, would you bring a short term belly chemical satisfaction asset like a big mac, or a long term spirit satisfaction asset like a Classic book in your mother tongue?
This is a straw man argument. Very, very few people will ever be in such a situation.
However, what is unfortunately much more common is day to day hunger. I'm willing to bet that most people (myself included), after a few days of not eating, would rather have the Big Mac than the Austen book.
It means that money isn't a good point system. The simplest way to reason this is that many people around the world make tons of money for selling something that isn't useful/valuable. Scams are probably at the bottom of the 'point system' but pull in tons of money.
For money to be a good point system, everyone with a wallet would have to be sensible and make good market choices but unfortunately the case is, for the most part, the exact opposite.
On top of that I would argue that (for example) Khan Academy is much more valuable than most of the investment firms, but investment firms are worth more $$$ than Khan Academy will ever be.
I may be mistaken, but it appears that noahc's point is about ‘keeping score to two decimal points’. There's no way we can detect some true absolute value in things or deeds, but we can at least have unambiguity.
Let's be constructive: what would be a better point system?
Ahh, I missed that very subtle point. Most of my experience with business comes from a taste of the music industry and reading on (most) bands struggling to make a dime, so my bias says that a good point system is the amount of fans you have, but! this clearly doesn't work for most things in life. I think the point system depends on what you are talking about, so perhaps for startups $$$ is the best point system we have available right now.
Again, this goes to a moral basis. Or at least a value judgment. The original question asked about which was cooler and supposed that money had a factor.
My point was that money is a factor, but not because it can be converted into signed limited edition Jane Austeen books for your private island. It is because it serves as a point system when you play the game of life.
Sure, we should think about how someone got the money. But that isn't what the question is about. The question is about how does an individual judge that something is cool. For many, it's about keep score. For a large subset of those money serves as a valid point keeping system.
I posted this as a reply to Goblin, but I missed the subtle point about it being a point system to 2 decimal places. I also made a point that I think it really depends on what type of thing you are trying to measure, as for bands a good point system is the amount of fans you have. With that said I think it's totally awesome to say that the best point system for startups is $$$.
Actually, a given copy of a book shouldn't be worth much since it's not difficult to get another copy. The last surviving copy of an Austen novel would be worth millions.
That is a real benefit on the big mac side, but in my current value scale it can't compete with the hours of delight, the self-improvement, the aesthetic pleasure, the deep insights in human hearts, etc. I am rewarded with when reading, say, Pride and Prejudice.
That's not inherent to the book, it's the value you put on the book. To my 8 year old brother, you can be sure the Big Mac will provide much more pleasure
The value system you are pitting against money is completely subjective and therefore somewhat useless as a points system.
A big mac would only keep the starving man alive for a few more hours. At least the man with the book could get some good entertainment before he starved to death.
One might define a meritocracy as one in which the coolness signalling aspect of money is no different from the resource gathering aspect. You also raise the interesting point about the granularity of money: if IBM makes more money than the Lisper for her Lisp, does that make IBM cooler? It could.
I think you can see this in real world. Look at Linus or David of 37 Signals. They have created at least millions if not billions of dollars worth of value (uncollected).
As a quick experiment with my girlfriend:
Do you know who Linus is? => Uh, No.
Do you know what Linux is? => Yeah, it's your system.
Do you know what IBM is? => Yes, it's a computer company.
It's pretty clear to me that outside of our nerd/geek bubble at the society level those that make more money are cooler.
Talking about 'How much someone is rich' without talking about 'How someone became rich' is so plainly wrong.
You have to work in order to make money. And to make a lot of money you need to work a lot, or at least harder. To do that you need to know how to use your time well.
Understanding some meta aspects of work is very important. And sometimes studying nerd lives can give you how they manage those meta aspects which affect the actual aspects which make them money.
Everything you've said is true, except for your first sentence. What we're talking about here is money as a proxy for an actual score board. At this resolution the score board is all that matters because we can't see the game being played.
Focusing on what to do is fragile. Removing negatives and learning what not to do is often more valuable in a general sense.
Health is a good example of this. "Doing" could include, for example, taking a drug. It may solve the surface problem, but its side effects are unknown and could have negative consequences that are harder to correct.
On the other hand, behaviors can be removed (i.e. remove carbs, remove soda, remove sugar, etc.). Maybe their immediate effect is less apparent but they are systemically more valuable for everything and far less is open to going wrong.
i think that's a pretty bad metric. there's absolutely no reason that working on the most important problems in your field won't end up being a complete waste of your time, because you are ill-equipped to make any real progress on them. i prefer feynman's philosophy, as expressed in a letter to a student who felt that the problem he was working on wasn't "worthwhile" enough:
The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. ... No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
I think what edw519 is getting at is that you should focus on the most important thing in the context of your business/goals. If you're a cancer researcher then, yes, get on top of that cancer research.
But if you're doing a software product, focus on building out a great feature or talking to your customers before you start wasting time on a pretty logo.
Richard Hamming (from "You and Your Research"):
http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.htmlPaul Graham's (from "Good and Bad Procrastination") generalization of Richard Hamming:
What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?
http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
edw519's generalization of Paul Graham:
Work on the most important thing until it's not the most important thing any more.
I have developed this excellent/horrible habit of not being able to focus on very much of anything if there was something more important hanging over my head.
Excellent in keeping me from trivial pursuits. Horrible at meal time, bed time, other people time. I'm still a work in progress.