
Nuggets of Thought – Modern thinkers on business, philosophy of success and life - eric_cartman
http://nuggetsofthought.com
======
aaron-lebo
This makes the mistake of correlating monetary success with wisdom.

Those are all salesmen. Go read Hatching Twitter. Jack Dorsey doesn't come off
well. Ed Catmull was extolling the virtues of the creative environment at
Pixar in Creativity, Inc. while John was regularly harassing women there. I
like Paul but he's one for big claims and the other end of that is where you
have to beg on HN to get Coinbase to give you your own money.

These guys are all impressive in their own right, but they should be taken
with a huge grain of salt. Too much recency bias. I'd suggest that none of
them belong in the same thought process as Marcus Aurelius, and they are put
on the same level here. If they do belong there, you'll know an about 500
years. As it is, I'm not sure how much more to trust them than John McArthur,
Creflo Dollar, or a random HN commentator. Hero worship is dangerous.

This is one of the Catmull quotes presented in full:

 _The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the
necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want
talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one
another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team
if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is
performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it. A good team is
made up of people who complement each other. There is an important principle
here that may seem obvious, yet — in my experience — is not obvious at all.
Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than
getting the right idea._

How that could be written while sexual harassment was going on is boggling.

~~~
dwaltrip
Paul Graham, Jeff Bezos, Charlie Munger, Naval Ravikant, Sherlock Holmes,
Richard Feynman, Edwid Catmull, and so on... the majority of the people on the
list are most certainly _not_ salespeople, and many of them are world leaders
in their respective fields.

Sure, it's unlikely any of them will be remembered as Marcus Arelius (Feynman
has a decent shot, though). But that is an incredibly high bar that leaves
behind much potential insight. It's also definitionally not attainable by
someone who is still alive today, so we have to keep that in mind.

~~~
aaron-lebo
Holmes is fictional. Graham and Bezos are salesmen in every sense of the word.
See my post for Catsmull.

It's not so much about having an incredibly high bar (though I'll admit it's
unfair), but just being aware that what they are selling you as insight might
not be as insightful as you think it is. Most people don't have the experience
to know whether they are wrong (I don't), this is the inherent danger. We also
tend to gloss over when they are wrong.

Skepticism is warranted, though maybe not the cynicism.

~~~
dwaltrip
You can make the argument that Bezos is a salesmen. But that is not certainly
NOT his primary role... so it's a misleading statement and it doesn't support
your main point.

I would argue that this collection of content has a fairly high signal to
noise, for someone who is sifting through it critically.

~~~
dfee
You believe selling is not his primary role? You used a double negative in
your comment so I’m unclear.

Anyway, as his duty to Amazon is selling equity and debt to drive growth - and
has been for the last 2 decades, if not 3 - I’d conclude that sales best
defines his primary duty.

Sure, he manages and directionally pushes the organization, but he’s doing
that to improve his ability to raise capital, increase shareholder confidence,
and build a tappable revenue pipeline.

How would you argue he’s not primarily a salesman?

~~~
dwaltrip
Sorry, sloppy typing on my phone.

He drives the vision and values of the company, makes major strategic
decisions, and so on. He decided to reinvest all profits into the growth of
the company for more than a decade, despite immense whining from investors.
And he drove the internal systems to be so well decoupled that AWS could
spring out from internal infrastructure as an amazingly successful secondary
business. And countless other things.

It sounds like you are describing the generic, money-manager CEO that is
brought in to run an existing stable business. I don't think Bezos fits that
mold.

Even in your own description, you said:

> build a tappable revenue pipeline.

which is much beyond the capabilities of a pure salesperson.

I totally agree that great CEOs need to be great salespeople (the good kind...
not the slimy kind). But that is only one aspect of what they need to do --
especially for complex, changing domains like where Amazon operates.

------
eric_cartman
It's a journal site where curators share bite-sized quotes and excerpts from
the books they've read on business, philosophy, psychology and everyday life.

