
How Running A Business Changes The Way You Think - JacobAldridge
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/07/08/business-psychology/
======
staunch
I'm worried you've fallen out of one trap (salarymanhood) into another (highly
paid consulting). I'm sure you're good at consulting and it's clear from the
way you write that you're excited to finally get paid what you're worth for a
change.

I'd just hate to see you wake up in a few years in a very similar situation as
you were in as a salaryman.

It sounds like you're significantly increasing your cost of living: new
apartment, getting married, treating money differently ("whats $2k when my
comfort is on the line"), etc. If you're not careful you're going to _need_ to
consult full time just to get by. Good bye startup. No time for that. Your new
wife quit her job six months ago and that new car isn't going to pay for
itself.

My advice: put off the enjoyment of making real money and get back to
_investing_ time in AppointmentReminder or something else that will pay big
scalable dividends.

That's what I'd say if we were having coffee :-)

~~~
abalashov
I fell into that trap while still on salary, and it still haunts me three
years into full-time consulting, and severely sabotaging attempts to
transition to being a product company. Don't make the same mistake. +1

------
GotToStartup
"I have since found that many, many people I respect likewise worry they’re
faking it. Anybody in my audience got the same issue?"

It’s funny, when I started out in the professional programming world I had a
ton of confidence. I felt unstoppable. Back then, I didn’t know shit about
programming but hey, how hard could it be. Then I started learning and slowly
my confidence starting dwindling away. The more I learned, the less confident
I became. I was humbled by the smart people I learned from. I realized how
little I actually know. Now I’m noticing how big of an issue confidence has
has become.

"I have found that actually showing confidence issues, on the other hand, does
not do great things for one’s business"

I’ve found that showing lack of confidence hurts in most areas of life. The
less confidence I speak with, the less people take me seriously though. It’s
ridiculous. Now, whenever I speak with certainty & confidence, it feels like
I'm faking it. It’s a huge internal struggle and it’s interesting to hear
others perspectives on this.

~~~
hammock
_Now, whenever I speak with certainty & confidence, it feels like I'm faking
it._

I have felt the same way. It's very hard to fight away that feeling, but I can
see the trance people go into when I cut away the "truthful", disclaimer-ed,
somewhat more equivocal and/or safe speech, and start talking like an expert,
like I believe I'm an expert even if I don't believe it - I see people fall
into a trance and I'm selling them. That's what you have to do, but it can
definitely feel.. weird. Fake or whatever word you want to use.

~~~
petercooper
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome>

------
JacobAldridge
Well we now have a better idea of the psychology behind 58,363+ Karma.

Patrick - as a business (not competent programming) guy who runs his own small
business, and consults / coaches many much larger businesses, this was
probably the article of yours I've had most empathy (and a thrill of
excitement) reading. I mean, the HN-man-crush has been there for years, but I
really received a lot of value feeling your feelings of suddenly being an
international business consultant and being _good_ at it. Even your writing
style here seemed more ... feely, though that may have been me.

And if that empathy gives me any credibility to support a key piece, more
people should add 50% (or more - one of my mentors told me recently to 2x +
$150 my price) more often. You are almost certainly more experienced and
confident than you think you are. Recognising that is paying massive dividends
for me.

------
patio11
As always, I'm happy to talk about it. I think I specifically owe jdietrich a
shoutout for his comment here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2667481> .
I knew in the back of my head that I care about being happy. It was not
obvious to me other people cared to read about that aspect of the business.

Back to our regularly scheduled tactics/strategy discussion next time.

~~~
michaeldhopkins
Thanks, I really enjoyed your essay. However, I didn't care for your subscribe
overlay appearing so abruptly. Would you please slide it down from the top or
use something else to ease it in on the reader?

~~~
dkokelley
Agreed. It was abrupt, and I thought for a second I must have scrolled too far
or accidentally switched tabs.

If there must be one (and I'm not against them), I would suggest the NY Times
style slider. It's unobtrusive and smooth, so I know where it is coming from,
and doesn't get in my way if I want to act on it. (Granted their objective is
to bring you to another article.)

------
ChuckMcM
Fascinating story and great insights. I think you undervalue your
introspection.

It raises an interesting question though, if you were in a class that graded
on a curve, did you do just enough to get an A or did you always get enough to
insure it would be an A minimum?

Then the harder aspect of that, did your getting an A ever result in someone
else getting a B grade? If it did would that make getting the A 'better'?

The question relates to the 'game' aspect of success. At Google, for example,
when I was there it had a lot of money and not a lot of real[1] projects. So a
number of people used gamification as a means of defining success.
Specifically they would seek out 'win' such as having their project grow at
the expense of others, or create the maximum amount of change in the shortest
amount of time, or any number of ways to create a scoring system and then to
'win' based on that scoring system.

The insight you had, and I came to later, was that if you're button is 'win'
and you take away the obvious 'company gets "better"' scoring system, people
invent their own.I concluded that one of the jobs of 'management' in that
scenario, is to help define a scoring system that allows folks who are 'wired
to win' be successful and not be destructive to those around them.

[1] 'real' in the sense that few projects would make money for the company or
cause it to lose money, they existed primarily as science projects to keep the
engineers busy.

~~~
patio11
I treat both school and business as PVE, not PVP. (Gamer to human translation:
the environment is the adversary to win over, not the other players.) There's
a reason my dashboards always show my historical sales stats, not my
competitor's sales stats. Beating my old score is a win. Beating their scores
is not.

An environment where many people were aiming to _cause losses_ would be very
unattractive to me, even if it could offer me all the tea in China.

~~~
Luyt
_Beating my old score is a win. Beating their scores is not_

Ayn Rand wrote: "A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by
the desire to beat others."

------
Omnipresent
I've been coming to HN for months and months always dreaming of doing
something on the side along with my megacorp job but I have not started on
anything. If I get an Idea, I wonder about it for 2 to 3 days thinking about
reasons why it won't work and forget about it. I think about at least opening
my own small consulting company on the side but then think how would I get any
clients. This has basically been going on for quite a lot of months. But I end
up going home, sitting in bed and still contemplating things. For what its
worth, I was happy before being bitten by the startup bug, I guess not knowing
what things CAN be like is better than knowing what things CAN be like but not
being able to do anything about it. Knowing that I need to change my attitude
and finish things, reading this article made me fill and mail the registration
for my LLC.

~~~
nthj
I've dealt with a similar issue the last few months, mate. Introspection to
the level of getting almost nothing done. I finally self-diagnosed myself with
a testosterone deficiency _, and immediately gave up caffeine, ate healthier
and started regular exercise. The introspection is still there, but it's far,
far, far less a problem, in only 3 weeks. I can't believe how much stuff I'm
accomplishing.

So if I can go from crippled to David Allen 2.0 in less than a month, there's
hope for anyone. Be healthy, be interesting, and the dreaming should naturally
turn into doing sooner rather than later. Far better than trying to force it.

_ I may or may not had an issue with this. The point is my psyche believed I
did, giving me specific ways to “fix it.” Mental game here.

~~~
Omnipresent
_Introspection to the level of getting almost nothing done._ I'll remember
that. Good to know I'm not the only one out there. I agree with you, finishing
things and getting things done should start eternally and inside you first.
key is to be consistent in anything you do.

------
kyro
This was great, Patrick.

I've been going through a hugely eye-opening period of my life where I'm
learning lessons that your article echoes. The largest of those lessons are:
A) Your main obligation is to serve yourself and to allow yourself to make
decisions you are truly happy with, and B) Much more than "It's not about what
you know, but who you know", I'm finding that it's really about "what you know
about how to deal with people you don't know." And for me, not knowing about
the latter prevented me from realizing the former, and your story about
missing the Delta flight not only validated those points to me, but really hit
home.

Additionally, I'm finding that the way I viewed my dealings in life and
overall progression as a person was completely backwards: I would look at my
past attempts, from social to professional, as a long string of failures that
would only continue to stretch onward, both discouraging me and crushing my
confidence. But in looking at my attempts as isolated, bunkered events, the
spread of potential damage is significantly decreased, which has done quite a
bit to boost my confidence in that I'm more willing to take that much more of
a risk. If the bomb blows up, leave the bunker and move on to the next one
with your newly acquired knowledge and experience. And no one really remembers
that bomb exploding as the explosion was merely a psychological dramatization.
I know you somewhat touched this point in a more business-negotiating context,
but it's one that's had a universal effect on how I deal with others in any
context.

Anyway, really nice writeup; I enjoyed it quite a bit! More articles like this
one would definitely be appreciated.

~~~
prpon
It is human nature to over estimate the impact of events or things we do.
Every one looks at the world with their own view point. They are the center of
their own universe. That's all the world we know.

May be not failing often is the reason why we take ourselves so seriously.
Your current view point of looking at things as isolated events is a great way
of looking at life.

------
justinph
I take great umbrage with his graph depicting teachers both as relatively high
paid and not working that hard. He says he's been a teacher, but given the
plot on the graph, I highly doubt it. It's way harder than you think, and
unless you're a tenured professor at a university, teachers make shit.

~~~
jseliger
I've never taught high school, but I'm a grad student and teach freshmen, so I
have some experience. A few observations:

1) The first time you teach a class, it's incredibly hard and time consuming,
but the difficulty drops like a logarithm to a relatively low plateau after
you've done it a few times.

2) At one point I thought about teaching high school English. Seattle Public
Schools paid $36K / yr with a Masters or $30K / yr without starting, and those
numbers topped at around $70K and $55K after 30 years (IIRC, Bellevue Public
School teachers made something like ~10K more). That doesn't count retirement;
teaching is unusual because a lot of the benefits are backloaded in the form
of retirement pay. One woman in my grad program taught English for 26 years in
Michigan and took an early retirement offer; I think she gets 70% of her last
year's salary for life. Granted, those deals are going away because of the
budget crisis, but a lot of the retirement stuff is still baked in.

3) You can multiply those numbers by 1.2 or so because teachers only have
mandatory work for nine months of the year.

4) After two to three years, you effectively can't be fired because of union
rules (unless you sleep with a student and get caught in a flagrant manner,
don't show up, etc.). See this post: <http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-
engel-doesnt-get/> for lots of citations on that, as well as a lot of the
information that's going into this comment. This has value. PG figured this
out: "Economic statistics are misleading because they ignore the value of safe
jobs. An easy job from which one can't be fired is worth money; exchanging the
two is one of the commonest forms of corruption. A sinecure is, in effect, an
annuity." <http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html> .

Note: there are major downsides to teaching. You have to like working with
relatively undeveloped people (if you're teaching high school) or children (if
you're teaching elementary school). In teaching, it's very hard to make
substantially more money if you really want to; whether you're a good or bad
teacher isn't likely to make you more money.

My big impression is that teaching isn't going to make you rich, but you're
also unlikely to ever be poor. To say that "teachers make shit" isn't really
true. It is to true to say that teachers have back-loaded compensation
packages that tend to be high in benefits (e.g. good health care, retirement)
and low in upfront salary.

My smaller impression is that most teachers I had didn't seem to work that
hard after their first three - four years of teaching.

~~~
jbooth
I'd say that "teachers make shit for knowledge workers". Yeah, they're not
going to the poorhouse (provided they can find a job in the first place and
get entrenched), and there are a lot of problems with union contracts, but if
you're educated enough to get a masters and good enough at teaching/politics
to make it through the first few years, you probably could've made more money
elsewhere.

------
astrofinch
Does the median investment banker really make that much? I was under the
impression that the mean investment banker income was high, but there was a
large amount of skew due to high salaries of the folks at the top.

I was also under the impression that the job involved a soul-crushingly large
workload...

------
icey
This should be recommended reading for anyone suffering from self-doubt before
making the leap into self-employment.

~~~
j_baker
You're not necessarily wrong. You're just damning the article with faint
praise. The point of the article wasn't "Do you want to start a business? Yes
you do. Go start one now."

It's more "Do you want to start a business? Yes? Go do it! No? No sweat! Just
make sure you're making yourself happy and not just toiling away to make
someone else happy."

The ultimate theme behind this blog post is to make sure your life is about
_you_ and your relation to other people. Otherwise, you get trapped into
believing a lot of shoulds: you should get a bachelor's degree, you should get
married, you should work long hours for terrible salary, etc.

------
aklein
RE: Working harder is not correlated to more money

But what about working smarter? Sure, such a thing is harder to measure, but
it's pretty much the only gauge when you're talking about meritocracy. Working
harder, not smarter, is the make-work bias.

~~~
pg_bot
I think it is also unfair to compare working hard between different
industries. That is like comparing apples to oranges, surely a harder working
software engineer will make more money than a lazy one.

~~~
patio11
_surely a harder working software engineer will make more money than a lazy
one._

I know two offices in NYC at an employer that I probably shouldn't name. In
one, an engineer toils away for 90 hour weeks and earns about $40k per year.
In the other, an engineer works fairly typical Manhattan hours (my
understanding is that that would be a little south of 50), and makes $120k.

The mistake made by the engineer in the first office? They were asked a fairly
consequential question by a HR department three years ago, and said "Yes."
instead of "No." Literally. One word.

The specific question was "Are you OK with your employer of record remaining
our Japanese branch office?" The right answer would have been to get their
employer of record transferred to the American subsidiary, which pays
Manhattan wages to Manhattan workers, rather than Nagoya wages with a 25%
hardship premium. He gets a gold star for loyalty, though.

That is about as close to a pathological case as I could think of, but in
general, "hard work gets rewarded" is not something we repeat because it is
accurate.

~~~
Omnipresent
does the first employee get paid 40K at the Japanese branch or in the states?

~~~
coryrc
"I know two offices in NYC"

------
gwern
> My friends also tell me that I’m almost a different man these days than even
> two years ago. The most striking quote to me, from my best friend: “You
> look… healthy.” Apparently the old day job was beating me down so thoroughly
> that I looked about as bad as I felt, and even on those days when I wasn’t
> dog tired I walked with a bit of a stoop. These days, I even stand
> straighter. I think that is almost too convenient to be true, but hey, it’s
> a story.

Could be testosterone; it's extremely sensitive to status changes, see the
review "The Role of Testosterone in Social Interaction" (abstract:
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661311...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661311000787)
; PDF: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/piis1364661311000787.pdf> )

------
matthiasb
"Money is also the convenient method of keeping score for optimizing
businesses, which feels like a game to me. I really enjoy winning games with
complicated rules sets, especially by optimizing the heck out of play, because
optimization is often as much fun as actually playing the game."

It reminds me a very inspiring talk by Seth Priebatsch called "A game layer on
top of the world". I was at SXSW 2011, you can listen to it here:
<http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP000325>

------
mashmac2
A (humorous but) very engaging similar story: <http://lifelessboring.com/less-
boring-life-start-time/>

Less facts, more stories, but another perspective on the 'be high status'
concept.

------
astrofinch
In three words: "Be high status".

------
waterside81
Fantastic read. People in general, but it seems developers particularly,
greatly underestimate their worth and talents. A friend of mine was looking
for work as a freelancer and asked me to what he should ask for by way of a
rate. I asked him how much he'd be happy with, he replied "60". I said, "so
ask for 100 and negotiate down if you must". He was blown away that someone
would pay that much.

------
Luyt
There is a strange layout error on Patrick's site. When I reach the end of the
article, suddenly some kind of overlay pops up, and makes the text unreadable.
See <http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/kalzumeus.png> for a screenshot.

~~~
po
A better question is why is it in comic sans for you? Do you have a user-
defined masochistic stylesheet or something?

~~~
Luyt
Oh, do not let the font distract you. Comic Sans is my all-time favourite; I
use it as a default/standard font on all my machines (Windows, OSX,
FreeBSD+KDE, Ubuntu etc...)

You know what they say: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I just find
Comic Sans a nice font to read and to program in. It's exquisite rounded
shapes are nice on my eyes.

~~~
po
O_o

 _Do not let the font distract you_ Not so easy.

You're just trolling me now right? I guess… I mean… agh. OK. Sure…

I've never thought it a particularly ugly font, I just always thought it was
overused and often used in the wrong contexts. I can't imagine programming in
it.

~~~
Luyt
No, I'm not trolling. I agree with you that Comic Sans is often used in wrong
contexts (although the situation is becoming better).

It's not wrong for programming either, in my opinion, see
[http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/comic-sans-
python.jp...](http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/comic-sans-python.jpg)
for an example. I dislike monospaced fonts for programming, and with that I'm
in the minority.

For games Comic Sans is also great, see
[http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/wow-Luyt-of-
Khadgar-...](http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/wow-Luyt-of-Khadgar-PVP-
healing-champ.jpg)

------
Create
These are old basic ideas[1] on pursuing happiness, in a slightly rehashed
way, with the ask culture (how does that work in Japan?) thrown in with some
randian self determinism.

[1] Schopenhauer <http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10741>

------
mcmc
Your skills don't just scale down to asking out a date or going to city hall.
They can scale up to $ billion mergers

Maybe the world would be a better place if you had influence over that kind of
semi-arbitrary wealth transfer as opposed to whoever has it now.

------
Tichy
Thank you for the inspiring write-up!

Btw, is it intentional that the blog suggests sharing the link on Delicious?
Is Delicious still a secret weapon perhaps?

~~~
patio11
I'm testing out a Wordpress plugin that I'm writing for a client, and I
figured I'd inflict it on my readers before I did it on their readers. (It
will get OSSed, eventually, after I iron more kinks out. Someone reported it
broke printing -- who knew?)

I hate TwitBook sharing buttons, for a bunch of reasons. Conversely, I _love_
the delicious button -- I slap it on (typically) geek-friendly reference
content and a) it gets a lot of instantaneous loving and b) it sends relevant
traffic for a long, long time.

Not too much an issue for my blog but very relevant to clients: many people
have Delicious -> blog setups. This means that a save on Delicious sometimes
counts as a link, in a way that tweets and FB activity typically do not. You
can imagine the SEO benefits of that one.

~~~
pkamb
"inflict" is a good word choice for that blue bar :)

~~~
Luyt
I dislike these boxes that slide into view when you reach the end of an
article. It distracts the eye from the text, like any moving thing or animated
GIF on the page. Just some static text below the article would be better, like
'Read other articles: ABC, DEF, XYZ' and perhaps some static tweet/facebook
button.

~~~
Tichy
Then again most advertisements aim to be at least a little bit distracting.
What would be the point of an ad that nobody sees?

------
kenjackson
Good article, but have serious reservations as to if he knows the full extent
of being a paperboy. That's a surprisingly hard job.

------
vaksel
the confidence to charge more is very important.

if you know what you are providing is quality, you can charge for it and
people will pay for it. Sure you'll get a bit more rejection...but those
cheapskates wouldn't have appreciated your work anyways.

and hey if they say no, you can always go back a few weeks/months later, and
tell them that you are running a discount

------
ignifero
Many things one can relate to in there. For example, I just realized I also
like praise for vanity/insecurity reasons. That's also the reason to write
this comment.

Confidence? You need to become a little macho to survive in business, but it's
also addictive. Overconfidence is a double edged sword, it's good to keep the
humility to yourself.

Whether having your own job/business can change you? I believe not, it just
allows you to be 100% yourself, disinhibited, not trying to cover up the sharp
edges of your character that you usually cannot display when you are a gear in
a corporate machine. For me it was also sort of like going back to childhood.

And it's a lot of fun (but i think that's the endorphines from the sense of
power you get).

Historically, excluding feudal and industrial/postindustrial europe people
were a lot more entrepreneurial, they would either be farmers, cobblers,
smiths; in general people were in charge of their art. Maybe they were also
happier back then.

------
klbarry
This is an excellent article, and fascinating to read. However, 5/6 of the way
down the page, a blue share bar appears on top that I cannot click out of. It
is quite annoying.

~~~
wedesoft
If you happen to use Firefox, I can recommend the iReader extension.
<http://www.samabox.com/extensions/iReader/>

~~~
Luyt
Thanks for the tip. There is also the Readability AddOn
(<http://www.readability.com/addons>) but that somehow hides the comments at
the bottom of the article. iReader does not.

