from Hacker News

The annoying habits of highly effective people

by ezhil on 10/1/18, 9:07 AM with 220 comments

• by DecayingOrganic on 10/2/18, 9:36 AM

  "The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, smartness, efforts, willfulness, hard work or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success.

  But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence (or, more in general, talent and personal qualities) exhibits a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth - often considered a proxy of success - follows typically a power law (Pareto law), with a large majority of poor people and a very small number of billionaires. Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale (the average talent or intelligence), and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes."

  I would highly recommend people here to take a look at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068

• by phakding on 10/2/18, 12:16 AM

  Never understood people's infatuation with reading CEO biographies. I've read a few and never found anything in it that could relate to. May be I am not meant to be one of those people. Even if I worked hard, got in at work at 5 am every day, I don't think I could go from being a lowely team lead to cto or CEO of a multi billion dollar corporation. I don't think it just works that way. I could be very wrong, but that's my experience.

• by dkarl on 10/2/18, 2:53 AM

  At one time I thought highly successful people would be more like each other than less successful people. I believed it even more when it was explained as the Anna Karenina principle. But my experience hasn't borne it out. There are many things you can point to as advantages or "best practices" but in the end it all seems to dissolve into our penchant for telling stories. One guy is successful because he was born into it, it's all he saw growing up, every element was demonstrated for him and instilled in him as normal his whole life. Another guy is successful because he was born with nothing and had to fight for every little thing, and he kept fighting for the next thing until he had a whole company. These are both coherent stories, but they don't explain the difference between those two and all the other people who were born to success but reverted to the mean or who were born into poverty and stayed there.

  I've seen people succeed with vastly different, contradictory strategies. I've seen engineers promoted to management earn respect by getting in the weeds and doing unwanted grunt work, and I've seen engineers promoted to management stay so hands-off from technical stuff that new employees assumed they were MBAs who didn't understand the work they were managing. I've seen people with humble origins flaunt them at every opportunity and others all but deny them. I've seen people who immersed themselves in detail to see the whole picture and people who carefully rationed the information they consumed to avoid being overwhelmed, systematically delegating the responsibility for details.

  Conclusion: that's the wrong way to try to understand the difference between luck and skill. Suppose you ran a huge experiment where you had 1000 chess grandmasters, 1000 masters, 1000 good amateurs, and so on down to 1000 chronic duffers, and they each inherited a thousand games starting at move eight (crediting the first seven moves to luck, circumstances, and childhood.) You wouldn't learn much by asking whether the winners attacked or defended, opened the middle or jammed it up, preferred their knights or their bishops. Those aren't the right questions. A grandmaster doesn't move a knight just because she likes knights, or because moving knights is the baller thing that all the grandmasters do. It's because it accomplishes something in their situation. If life was a game you could play over and over again, with executive control gradually fading in starting in the teenage years, a brilliant player might play each lifetime very differently. It's an interesting thought experiment to ask what skills you would develop as you "played" dozens or hundreds of lifetimes! Certainly not rigid rules like "wake up at 5am" or "wear the same thing every day."

• by motohagiography on 10/2/18, 12:39 PM

  Given this issue a lot of thought, mostly after reading Jeffery Pfeffer's views about how most CEO biographies are designed to kick the ladder away behind them.

  Given the exponential / power law distribution of returns, if you are anywhere on the left hand side of that curve, you are doing phenomenally well, even if your actual place on it is random. This curve is the mechanism behind the Matthew Effect as well. To get there, you just need to survive long enough to end up on it somewhat randomly. The competitive environments in offices are really about getting exposure to opportunity - not reaping the rewards of work. This is why some seemingly dumb people do well. They have the relationships that get them exposure to the opportunities to end up somewhere randomly on that exponential curve.

  You'll notice that people who fail or stagnate in offices are the ones who have been isolated from peers, customers, sales people, and other sources of exposure to randomness, and that is not an accident. Highly successful people ensure they are at the front of the queue for those random opportunities, and whether they do that through merit or mendacity is ultimately immaterial. Being smart is not about problem solving or abstraction, it's an instinct for always getting the option on opportunity.

  Absolutely recommend Pfeffer on this.

• by siruncledrew on 10/1/18, 8:33 PM

  I think another thing that influences annoying habits of "effective" people is that no executive/manager is going to hold a CEO accountable for being late/strolling into work, whereas if a CEO didn't like it that person would be be immediately told to stop and change their behavior.

• by weberc2 on 10/2/18, 12:46 AM

  What a strange, disappointing article. I was expecting trends in annoying behavior, but this was just some low-grade complaining about rich people. And I'm not complaining about people complaining about rich people, I'm complaining about the poor quality of the complaints:

  - Richard Branson once said that he didn't like when people were late, but Virgin's trains aren't very timely

  - Tim Cook would probably be just as successful if he got up three hours later (opines the writer)

  - General fear mongering about the dangers of executives like Jobs and Zuckerberg wearing the same attire every day

• by mamon on 10/2/18, 12:41 AM

  I always laugh at this obsession with early rising. Many factory line workers wake up at 4:30 am every day, because their shift starts at 6:00 am, and somehow that does not make them billionaires.

• by randomsearch on 10/2/18, 7:11 AM

  Anyone who thinks cutting down on sleep is a good idea should read “why we sleep”.

  Don’t do it. You’ll be less effective at work and you’ll seriously damage your health. Fact.

• by wffurr on 10/2/18, 12:57 AM

  http://archive.is/TtLIn non-paywall link

• by harry8 on 10/2/18, 1:09 AM

  It's not an exact analogy but if you start with the idea of "Characteristics of lottery winners." As the base and make it entirely up to the author to show with evidence that their content is actually better than that when they discuss CEOs, you'll avoid a bunch of total BS.

• by amai on 10/2/18, 7:37 AM

  Related to the topic I can recommend the book Hansen: Great at Work (https://www.amazon.com/Great-Work-Performers-Less-Achieve/dp...). It is probably the first statistical analysis on what makes people really successful at work.

• by lbriner on 10/2/18, 8:48 AM

  Rsing at 4:00am is more likely to either be the symptom of someone addicted to their work above all else but it also probably shows the fragility of life at the top! If you were Tim Cook, what would you do next in a company with billions of spare cash to keep the investors away from your door and without losing focus?

  I don't think I would sleep if that was me!

• by rconti on 10/2/18, 5:41 AM

  So the article starts out by saying that you won't be successful just by emulating Tim Cook (rises early) or Jeff Bezos (putters in the morning).

  Shouldn't the author have just ended it there by concluding that neither one of these habits is necessary in order to be successful, rather than going on complaining?

• by scottmcleod on 10/2/18, 12:41 AM

  Uhh this article is useless click bait.

• by exabrial on 10/2/18, 3:57 AM

  I wouldn't call Tim Cook an effective manager though. He centralizes decisions on himself and had been turning Apple's reputation and Halo-effect into cash rather than innovation.

• by keyle on 10/2/18, 1:03 AM

  Are articles like these even worth writing still? We're many years out of this type of self/help gluttony now, aren't we?

• by shay_ker on 10/2/18, 12:52 AM

  CEO biographies are interesting just like any other biography, I suppose. But never once have I heard/read, "I read this other CEO's biography and decided to copy their habits, and that was my secret."