
Doing vs Telling - iSimone
http://sachagreif.com/doing-vs-telling/
======
jamesjyu
Ah, self-promotion: a perennial HN topic. What I've seen is that there is a
rift between the typical hacker and self-promotion.

As with most things, it's about balance, which Sacha hits upon. Success means
that you need to self-promote, but at the right times with the right stuff to
back it up. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to hackers/developers
who are so vehemently against self-promotion to the point of blindness, and
then, in the same breath, complain that other people who are less talented are
getting too much attention by self-promoting.

I come from the school of thought that you need to be ultra-prepared and
totally understand something and perfect it before even thinking about self-
promotion. And, I assume, a lot of other hackers have this same mentality.

But, I realized that sometimes, you just need to ship and talk about what
you're doing. It'll make you feel better, and also propel you to ship even
more stuff. And in this way, self-promotion isn't only to tell other people
that you're doing stuff, but it's also to get feedback and improve yourself.
One cannot make great work in 100% isolation.

What a lot of hackers fail to realize is that by making something work and
communicating to other people about it, you're already in the top percentile
of people. It's OK to talk about it! Heck, it's also OK to promote it on HN
and all the other usual channels. People will appreciate you sharing it. And
the haters? Well, they'll always be there, even if you wait to perfect it. :)

So, if your head is swirling with thoughts that you may be too self-
promotional, you probably aren't. Just share it.

PS. Dustin Curtis should pursue a career in marketing. Curating a network of
quality bloggers would be a great move for him. He knows how to promote,
design, and curate very well.

~~~
knewter
"I come from the school of thought that you need to be ultra-prepared and
totally understand something and perfect it before even thinking about self-
promotion...But, I realized that sometimes, you just need to ship and talk
about what you're doing."

I think this is completely spot on, and it took me a long time to realize it.
Recently, I'd been wanting to set up continuous deployment at our shop but I
didn't know exactly the right way to do it. I also didn't post larger blog
posts often at the time. I finally decided I wanted to post about doing
continuous deployment with jenkins and capistrano [1].

So I set about to make it work. It's not the most elegant solution, and there
are at least 3 things that are suboptimal with my method that I wouldn't use
for a mission critical production use case...but we're using it for our own
internal apps and our website, and so we don't care that much about those
suboptimal bits.

Writing a blog post about how we were doing it generated tons of traffic to
our site, and it also provoked a couple of conversations whereby I figured out
a couple of things to do to make my method perfect - and subsequently gives me
a new blog post later to write :)

Anyway, just wanted to throw in an anecdote - definitely think too many people
get buried under the weight of 'but i'm not perfect yet'

[1] [http://isotope11.com/blog/continuous-deployment-with-
capistr...](http://isotope11.com/blog/continuous-deployment-with-capistrano-
and-jenkins)

------
benohear
Actually fame followed by action is a fairly well trodden route. Jeff Atwood
and 37Signals come to mind straight away.

And to some extent Paul Graham. Granted, he successfully sold a startup during
the dotcom years, but it's only with YCombinator that his achievements matched
his essays.

~~~
huggyface
I would most certainly exclude both 37 Signals and Paul Graham from such a
list.

~~~
benohear
Why? SVN was pretty big before they launched Basecamp. I seem to remember even
they saying it was instrumental to their success.

Granted, Paul Graham is a bit more of a stretch given that he's had a
successful exit. But unlike YC, Yahoo Stores was hardly a major event in the
wider scheme of things. Pre YC, I remember thinking that there was a major
mismatch between his essays and his achievements.

~~~
shadowsun7
He wrote two influential Lisp books, invented Bayesian spam filtering, did
Arc, wrote essays (where the doing == the telling) and he had the Yahoo exit.

 _Then_ he started YC.

This doesn't disprove your primary point (that fame can precede the 'doing'),
but I'd say that pg shouldn't be on the above list. You make a good point
about 37signals, though. And I'll add Steve Yegge to that list too (Amazon ->
Google)

~~~
MatthewPhillips
> invented Bayesian spam filtering

Is Wikipedia wrong on this one?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_spam_filtering#Histor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_spam_filtering#History)

~~~
shadowsun7
I originally wrote 'popularized Bayesian spam filtering', but thought it
wasn't strong enough. (What do you call 'made Bayesian spam filtering good
enough, and then published an influential essay that caused the adoption and
further improvement of the technique'?)

Thanks for the link - didn't find that in my cursory Google search.

------
Swizec
The good old luck coefficient argument - the amount of luck you have is the
area under a graph where Y is "how many people know about it" and X is "what
you do".

For some reason I can't find the specific blog talking about this right now,
but it's a fairly straightforward logical concept.

~~~
kgtm
I'm fairly sure this must be the blog post you are trying to remember: [
[http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-
surf...](http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-area)
].

------
sgdesign
I know it looks like it, but I promise this is not an attempt at kissing
Dustin Curtis' ass so he lets me in the Svtble network…

------
c1sc0
Agreed that both doing and telling are important. When done well, both can
become an art-form. One thing I find myself struggling with all the time is
switching between these two modes of thought. I find that the switching cost
to go from 'doing' to 'telling' is even higher than flipping from 'doing A' to
'doing B'.

~~~
sgdesign
That's a really, really good point. Once I switch myself to "telling" mode, I
find myself maniacally refreshing HN, replying to every tweet, obsessing over
traffic stats and referrers, and doing countless other unproductive things.

I usually need a day or two before I feel comfortable ignoring the rest of the
world while I switch back to "doing" mode.

------
olalonde
I agree that both doing and telling are important, but I disagree they are
equally important. In addition, I don't think that lack of self-promotion is
such a widespread phenomenon that it warrants a blog post to raise awareness
of the problem.

~~~
sgdesign
That's a clear case of survivor bias. The only people we hear about are the
ones who self-promote, so we naturally assume that everybody self-promotes.

The truth is that there's a ton of people out there putting out great work
without making a fuss about it, and thus not getting the recognition they
deserve.

------
snitko
The amount of links per line of text in this article is really distracting.

~~~
sgdesign
Thanks for the feedback, I've toned it down.

------
tablet
Do > tell

Write > read

Think > speak

Left side matters more

------
huggyface
_Whether we like it or not, the truth of the matter is that telling is just as
important as doing._

I'm a little unsure whether you mean "doing and then telling", or "telling in
lieu of doing". It's confusing because the context is Curtis sort of unveiling
some sort of blogging platform.

If the latter, it is notable that telling _drowns out_ doing. Telling is a
very poor substitute for doing anything, and pundits like Curtis, Gruber, that
Microsoft-loving guy who I can't remember, Jeff Atwood...these guys have as
little significance -- for their telling -- as a sports commentator who
insists that the Yankees are the best. That's great, speak to your community
and all, but utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

The trick is in trying to pivot your success building, essentially, followers,
into success doing, which Atwood did to great success, and Curtis is now
trying (Gruber is still stuck trying to pitch t-shirts). Good for Dustin to
make that change, however the very valid comment that many have, as quoted in
the article, is "why should this get hype?". Why should we assume that Curtis
has any insight or particular value building a blogging platform just because
he got a tonne of links for a highly suspect defense of 3.5" smartphone
screens.

~~~
sgdesign
_Why should we assume that Curtis has any insight or particular value building
a blogging platform_

I think Svbtle can be judged on its own merits. Did it have particular value
for you or not? That's the key question.

My point was more that _if_ you think Svbtle has value, it shouldn't be
dismissed just on the grounds that Dustin Curtis is a pundit. Because being a
good pundit has value as well in itself.

Of course, if you think Svbtle sucks, then no amount of hype will be able to
change your mind, and that's the way it should be.

~~~
huggyface
_My point was more that if you think Svbtle has value, it shouldn't be
dismissed just on the grounds that Dustin Curtis is a pundit._

And on that point I think _everyone_ agrees. The people you are replying to
aren't saying that it has no merit because Curtis is a pundit. They are saying
that it doesn't have merit _because_ he is a pundit.

I saw that unknown, unqualified project of completely unknown merit linked and
heralded across the net. Why? It certainly isn't standing on its own at this
point.

~~~
sgdesign
Right, but I'm not sure if the distinction is always that clear. Having a
negative opinion about him because "he hasn't done anything" can also easily
color your perception of Svbtle itself ( _insert link to Wikipedia page about
some psychology principle here_ ).

And I might be wrong, but I thought that the publicity was due in big part to
the Svbtle vs Obtvse controversy. If he got all that coverage just by being
Dustin Curtis then I guess I'm even more impressed with him…

------
funkah
Nice little shot at Gruber in there. Classy

~~~
huggyface
How is it a "shot" at Gruber? The author makes a valid observation that people
do question what Gruber has done, and for valid reasons.

Opinions are a dime a dozen. Everyone has them. Being a famous blog
commentator has little to do with profound wisdom or a particular insight, but
usually speaks more to the raw ability to pander to an audience.

And for the record, I respect Gruber for Markdown. He gains zero respect for
years of Apple punditry.

~~~
raganwald
I agree it isn't a shot at Gruber, it's a statement about what people might or
might not think about Gruber. Which is fine. Personally, I didn't think that
was the best part of the OpEd. Leaving Mr. Curtis out, let's compare Gruber to
me. I pontificate on programming. Whether explicitly or by implictaion, I hold
myself as having some authority on the subject by virtue of experience.

Looking at my track record... Hmmm... We are not talking about someone who
invented anything significant. People can rightly take me to task for having
an imbalance between my doing and my telling.

What about Gruber in comparison? He takes a lot of people to task for
criticizing Apple. He's mostly a gadfly. He serves up "claim chowder." He
talks about he industry in broad terms. But does he hold himself out as an
expert? I don't think so.

In that, there is all the difference. Having an opinion and telling people
your opinion without claiming you back your opinion with experience and/or
expertise is always fine. Gruber is a reporter of sorts, a journalist. He
reports what he sees and how he sees it, which is different than offring
people advice on what to do from the presumed position of being an auhority.

I don't ask what Gruber has done, because he doesn't tell me how to interview
programmers, or whether Ruby is a better language than CoffeeScript, or why
funcional programming is a waste of time.

JM2C.

