

Ask HN: Who's the most inspirational figure in your professional life? - SteveV4389

Shigeru Miyamoto is mine. I really appreciate his thoughts on innovation and some of his quotes are truly inspiring.
======
mindcrime
Holy fT%!#, that's a hard question to answer, because there are so many great
candidates. If I had to pick one though, I guess I'd start with my dad. No,
he's not rich, not famous, you've never heard of him, he doesn't do anything
really technology related, and he couldn't spell "venture capital" if you
spotted him the "venture capit" bit. In fact, he dropped out of school in 8th
grade to go work and never really learned to read well. I expect the Internet
is about as useful to him as a skateboard is to a blue whale.

That said, he's one of the smartest people I know, and he has a couple of
things that allowed him to become fairly successful over time: an
entrepreneurial spirit, great work-ethic, and absolute pigheaded
determination. To the extent that I have any of those things, I credit my
dad's influence, whether it's a genetic thing, or just social influence during
my formative years, or both, or whatever.

All through my childhood, my dad made attempt after attempt at starting and
running various businesses. From memory I can recall: running a pulpwood
truck, cutting down trees and hauling logs to the paper mills; making handmade
crab traps; building docks and bulkheads; a shrimping business, selling fresh
shrimp to seafood wholesalers; a business running a bush-hog, clearing lots
and what-not; a fill-dirt and land grading/levelling business; and probably
one or two more that I'm forgetting. In between those, he made a living
working back-breaking manual labor jobs, mostly on dredge boats. But after
many years, he started a business pouring and finishing concrete... doing
foundations, slabs, driveways, etc. And that one finally "caught" and he makes
a nice living doing that now. He's at the stage where he has crews working for
him, and he just does what we would call "business development" and
"prospecting".

Outside of my dad, if I had to cite some influential figures, I think Nicola
Tesla would be on the list, as would Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Linus Torvalds,
rms, Kevin Mitnick, Lou Gerstner, Tom Siebel, esr, rtm, and our very own pg.
I'd also have to give a nod to my current $DAYJOB boss, acoliver. Oh, and Bob
Young, of Red Hat and Lulu fame. I guess Mark Zuckerberg would count as well,
even though I'm not a huge Facebook fan. Oh, Larry Page and Sergey Brin from
Google, also.

~~~
SteveV4389
Elon Musk will definitely be someone our great-grandchildren will doing
reports on in school. He just doesn't quit! Amazing.

------
iends
Joel Spolsky

