Author: wanderingwanderingstar

“Young people are not yet really having individuality or strong power.

“So I tell them, you can copy somebody who you like very much. Copy it and copy it until at the end of the copy you have found yourself.”

-Yohji Yamamoto

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22/ A fixed mindset is about having a sense of dignity based on a fixed sense of who you are, whether based on wealth, or prowess at a type of work presumed to be of eternal significance.

23/ A growth mindset, on the other hand, is about having a malleable, adaptive sense of identity that is subject to constant renegotiation with the universe. To some extent, this is an unearned privilege, but one perhaps more democratically distributed than other sorts of privilege.

24/ This constant renegotiation is achieved through steady experimentation with your own life. This means skills never harden into ossified habits, or turn into hardened identities, or into anchors for patterns of social affiliation.

25/ This also means wealth, or any other form of accumulated gains, cannot become a source of hardened identity or social affiliation.

26/ Real experiments can surprise you with their outcomes. To experiment on yourself is to be open to changing yourself in unscripted ways. This inevitably means your social milieu is also subject to change. You may come to despise old friends, and learn to admire those you formerly despised.

27/ This also means things you may have accumulated, be it wealth, degrees, or awards, may suddenly seem worthless to you, while things you ignored as worthless and not worth accumulating may suddenly become priceless and leave you feeling impoverished.

28/ Fixed mindset people also have a fixed sense of their place in the society. The only sort of social mobility considered acceptable is scripted mobility that does not betray the values of “where you came from.”

29/ This stricture is particularly strong in America. You will not be punished for starting from the wrong side of the tracks and making millions. You will, however, be punished for abandoning an interest in football for an interest in French poetry, and making new friends.

30/ Industrial age psychology reflects these norms. As William Whyte noted in The Organization Man, psychology in the industrial age was about producing “well adjusted” individuals, not mentally healthy ones.

31/ Being “well-adjusted” with respect to a disappearing class is a sort of insanity. At the same time, “betraying” obsolete class loyalties to adapt to new realities is sanity that makes you externally maladjusted.

32/ One consequence of this well-adjustedness bias in industrial psychology is that you’re mostly on your own if you choose to adopt a growth mindset. Society is by definition not designed to provide support to transgressors of its own, class-segmented norms.

33/ If you are living in an experimental way – self-learning skills for which there are no schools, making the “wrong” sorts of friends, living in the “wrong” places, and cultivating the “wrong” tastes – you are part of the cognitive elite.

34/ There are no core textbooks, maps, or scripts for this path. You are a lifelong ongoing experiment. You may sometimes find co-conspirators for some experiments, but your default sample size is n=1. The only expert authority you can appeal to is you.

35/ You may spend a few years in one community, move on to another, or spend some years pursuing solitary personal challenges. Experimental living can take many forms.

36/ You may be attracted to experimental (and experiential) living communities devoted to particular kinds of exploration, but your primary loyalty will be to the deepest truths about yourself.

37/ Quantified Self, the rationality community, hipsterdom, lifestyle design in Bali: ultimately, these are just chapter headings. Not the text, let alone the whole novel.

38/ Some friendships may endure for a lifetime. Others may be restricted to one or the other chapter of your life. Still others may turn into enmity despite your best efforts.

39/ Experimental living isn’t about living in San Francisco and going to Burning Man every year. Many “burners” are very colorful people but creatures of habit living highly non-experimental lives.

40/ It isn’t even about that well-studied psychological trait (part of the Big 5) called “openness to experience” because you can be safely “open” in very risk-limited ways.

41/ Experimental living is about being willing to pay the emotional and social costs of truly experimenting on yourself, with your entire self being open to radical reconstruction. For the rest of your life.

42/ As the opening McKay quote suggests, crowds are good for going insane with, but regaining and maintaining your sanity is by default a solitary, lifelong struggle.

43/ You are a being at the intersection of two worlds: one is the shared external world. The other is your private internal world, which ultimately only you can truly access.

44/ The cognitive science of you, like any other science, is a path of accepting pain in order to discover novel truths about yourself. And like it or not, on some parts of this path you will be alone.

45/ You will have to repeatedly overcome the fear of being an outcast, and resist the seduction of false promises of communal belonging. You will inevitably hurt others, despite your best efforts to be gentle. You will inevitably be hurt, despite your best efforts to be stoic.

46/ If you rise to all those challenges, congrats, you will be part of the cognitive elite, and live a life under constant, unpleasant siege by the fixed-mindset world.

47/ But I’ll guarantee you this: whatever the outcomes of your experiments, you will never regret choosing growth and change over the comforting stasis of a fixed identity.

http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=29c00c50f0

//story of my life… 

alternate paths, always taken.

wouldn’t ever have dared to label it cognitive elitism.

“I talk to people looking for their next gig on a regular basis. It’s fun to match awesome people who don’t want to found companies up with companies who need awesome people. One question I get asked over and over again in various forms is, do you think I’ll get rich from startup X?

My first piece of advice for startup job seekers is that equity, all things equal, you can’t pick ‘em. On a risk-adjusted basis, startups are likely to be about the same. If there is information that a company has significantly de-risked, it will be priced in. Despite the market often being very wrong, you are unlikely to outsmart it.

“If you want to get rich, your best bet on a risk-adjusted basis is to join a profitable and growing public company. Google for short. Make $200-500k all-in a year, work hard and move up a level every 3-5 years, sell options as they vest (in case you joined Enron), and retire at 60, rich. This plan works every time.

Beyond the sub-market salary you’ll receive for joining a startup, there are no financial guarantees. Your equity is probably worthless. The whole damn thing might fall apart any time. The hours are long. A lot of shit won’t work right. Etc.
But, as far as I know, startups are the only way to get 20 years of experience in five. The reason to join a startup is because you are awesome, you’re willing to work hard, and you don’t want to wait 20 years to be making decisions that impact the business.

And if you go in with this mentality, even when startups fail, you succeed. If you put five years into building a company and team, you will end up with a great network of talented and motivated people, lots of first-hand experience, and often some management experience as well.

Worst case, your next step could be going into Google at the VP level it would’ve taken you 15 years to get to joining out of college to “inject some startup DNA,” and catch up on salary within a few years. Unless this internet thing is a fad, that job will always be there for you.

But for all that is good and holy, don’t join a startup for the fucking money.”

But if you’re really determined…

Be clear on what you want. Do you want to join pre product-market fit, or post? Do you need a salary, if so, how much? Do you care about vertical or role? Location? Travel? Etc. Most people that end up in the wrong job didn’t think through what their ideal job was before looking.

Run a process. Most people fail at this. Startups are interviewing you, but you’re interviewing them too. Write down your criteria. Look at 200 startups, contact 50, do first interviews with 20, move forward with 5, pick between 2-3 good options. If you’re passive, or only talk to a few companies, you’ll be choosing between limited options. You can get 200 plausible startups in a couple hours.

Focus on good people/culture. Above all else, my observation is that when you find good people (high-integrity, smart, hard working, etc) and a compatible culture, you end up happy, even if the company fails. When you ignore suboptimal people fit because you think the product is sexy or you’ll make money, you end up sad.

Accept fair comp. Many people are unrealistic on comp. They want an early-stage experience with Google salaries. It doesn’t work that way, and startups often suck at explaining that. Talk openly with startups about what they can pay you, what they’ve raised, what your needs are, and what milestones will lead to higher salary. Keep in mind, you might be the first person to take a salary and the founders might have been working for two years. Sure, it’s a 50% haircut for you, but for them it’s a big chunk of their first round.

Expect to earn it. Some startups will hire a dev and call them CTO. That doesn’t make them a CTO. If you want to be a CXO, say so up front, but expect to earn it. Entering a startup is a lateral move with unlimited upside. Tell the startup where you want to be, and set milestones that give you what you want that make the company successful. Now you’re a CXO.

Discount the vertical. With a few role exceptions, what you’re actually making isn’t that important. Assuming the company is making something people want and you’re delivering a ton of value, most people can be as happy making enterprise cloud infrastructure as social networking tools. Business development is business development. Do it with/for people who do not suck.

Understand the basics of the business. You shouldn’t try to become an expert, but you can ask some basic questions. What is the valuation of the company, and what’s the valuation for your purposes? How much has the company raised to date? How much money does the company have in the bank, and what is the net burn rate? What milestones does the company need to hit to get to the next round?
This is good to know so you can roughly assess the business. But it’s also a great way to understand how you fit in. Can you help with the core problems the company needs to solve?

Bias towards transparency. Companies can’t be expected to share every single detail with employees, especially potential hires. But, in general bias towards companies that give employees info to make informed decisions You should, for example, know what percent of the company you own. Trust is a two way street, and if the company lies to it’s employees, it’s hard to maintain that trust. Life is too short to watch your back inside the building.

http://startupljackson.com/post/135800367395/how-to-get-rich-in-tech-guaranteed

//dropping knowledge

@stevesi adds his salient, thoughtful and on-point notes to a great piece on Product Management. https://medium.com/@stevesi/there-are-some-great-thoughts-about-product-management-in-this-post-i-shared-this-broadly-4f62268beaa1

// Try replacing “PM” with “Creative Director” (or similar title for someone leading design work”…