
Abandon Your Big Idea. But Don’t Give Up Your Big Ambition. - ph0rque
http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/12/08/abandon-your-big-idea-but-dont-give-up-your-big-ambition/
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ghc
Remember, entrepreneurs: this is how academics think. And this is the attitude
that makes begging for money via grants a lot more appealing than
entrepreneurship. It's "give me money to do this because I'm an expert in it"
instead of "make something people want and they will give you money."

~~~
chubot
Huh? So entrepreneurs are "better" than academics? That's just silly and
pompous.

Remember, 90% of everything is crap. That goes for both businesses and
research.

~~~
ghc
I have no idea how you got that conclusion from my comment. My point was that
the academic attitude about expertise is pompous. I've worked with several
academics and research labs trying to turn their research into startups, and
you would not believe the attitudes prevalent in academia. The most common
example of this I've seen is when professors bring up a potential competitor
and state that the competitor does not have as much expertise (no founders
with PhDs in the subject matter) as the professor, so the professor's new
company should succeed wildly.

If the attitude present in this article was paid any mind by innovators, we
would not have some things we truly love. My favorite example is ZFS. Built by
prodigious hackers, not distributed filesystem experts by any means. I can't
find the article anymore, but I remember reading that they felt their lack of
expertise allowed them to approach the problem from a new angle, ignoring
common wisdom.

My message to young entrepreneurs is this: Innovation doesn't work by experts
expertly shaping the future incrementally. Innovation is messy. It works by
lots of people - some experts, some not - trying to solve a problem. Almost
everyone will fail, but you can't succeed if you don't try.

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AznHisoka
I agree with this, and see this trap in lots of entrepreneurs. They want to
disrupt healthcare, or teleconferencing without any domain expertise in it.
They think having a keen sense of UI, superb technical skills, with some SEO
mixed in will get the job done, but without the deep domain knowledge, you're
just rolling the dice. I think that's what the author is getting at.

Example: The person who just wants to innovate for the heck out of it will
create an app that allows people to learn foreign languages through Skype. The
person who's actually studied foreign languages and accelerated learning will
create an app that concentrates on input/listening first.

~~~
PakG1
On the other hand, I wonder about the philosophy from David Sacks. But I guess
he's also admitting that when you reach a certain point, you need people who
know how to get inside from experience in order to really hit it big. But when
starting up, he seems to say avoid getting those people involved.

 _One of the lessons we learned is that professional managers hired from the
industries you're trying to disrupt tend not to be very beneficial. This whole
idea that Mark Zuckerberg should stay CEO of Facebook, as opposed to being
replaced by a professional manager, that was one of the things we learned at
PayPal early on. If you look at the PayPal companies, they did not try to
replace the initial leadership with supposedly more qualified people. Don't
hire people from the industries you're trying to disrupt. They have too much
ideological baggage about the way things have to work.

One of the ways PayPal was so successful is we did not know all the Visa and
MasterCard rules we were supposedly violating. There were other companies who
didn't pursue what we were pursuing because they thought it'd be a violation
of the rules. In fact, was it a violation of the rules? At most it was a grey
area because Visa and MasterCard rules weren't written for the Internet....

eBay certainly felt constrained -- this may have been a rationalization after
the fact for losing to a company they so clearly should have beaten -- but
they always said they felt too constrained with the risks and liability they
could take on. PayPal was able to take on these massive liabilities because if
the company didn't work it was going to go out of business anyway so there was
nothing to lose.

BI: How do you apply those lessons here at Yammer? Particularly in hiring --
do you look for people who have never worked at big software companies?

DS: Yes. There's a strong strand of consumer DNA in our company. Out of the
first 15 people who started, none of them worked at an enterprise software
company. I don't think we hired anyone who had worked at an enterprise
software company until last year. We came at it from a blank slate. What we've
learned is there are certain enterprise functions we've had to backfill.
There's been this steady process of starting with a consumer mindset and then
saying, "OK, we need an enterprise sales team. We need some enterprise
marketing to back them up."

BI: Do you find you need a big enterprise sales force to compete with the big
guys?

DS: In the large accounts, yes._

[http://www.businessinsider.com/david-sacks-
qa-2011-11#ixzz1g...](http://www.businessinsider.com/david-sacks-
qa-2011-11#ixzz1g2Aa0Cyn)

------
signalsignal
Question from the Article: She admitted that she was having trouble with this
ambition because no one at her school did behavioral neuroscience research.
“But I really want to get involved in that area,” she emphasized. “How do I
find someone to work with me? I’m stuck.”

Answer Given: "I told her to abandon the idea."

Correct Answer: Find another school.

~~~
zyfo
Are you kidding me? She's an undergraduate. Presumably she chose the best
school she could get into. It's not graduate studies.

~~~
anamax
> Presumably she chose the best school she could get into.

There is no "best school". There's a "best school for what you're trying to
do". If you change what you're trying to do, the "best" school may change as
well.

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mashmac2
Important to note also, this blog article is aimed at students, who don't have
significant domain experience in _any_ field most likely.

Therefore, his advice is sound _for this audience_ as giving up big ideas is
necessary when they're so nebulous and you don't have anything you could apply
it to. An entrepreneur, by definition, has a skill in 'making something people
want' and getting them to give you money and can apply that skill to a field,
regardless of if they have much experience in that field.

~~~
nickpinkston
While agree that this must be filtered for his audience of students, I have to
take issue with his tone that seems to boil down to what most of academia
does: very unambitious incremental research. Sure - this schlep is needed, but
I think his cadre our too biased in this direction. The system dislikes risky
research, and that's a shame.

Also, a glance at his books looks exactly like the grade-grubbing BS that
leads to kids becoming valedictorian and then failing to do anything of
significance after. These zombie achievers miss the point of education, and I
feel like this guy is only encouraging them.

~~~
psyklic
The article merely says that to make progress in a field, your best bet is to
become an expert in it first.

~~~
Ankur84
I think he's saying, to make progress in a field, find a place where there are
experts and work with them.

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ph0rque
Not sure I agree with his thesis in the context of entrepreneurship...
sometimes, the inexperienced person comes up with a surprising (and
surprisingly scaleable and profitable) take on a problem precisely _because_
of lack of experience. However, I don't know if that's a statistical anomaly.

~~~
mashmac2
I'd lean towards the idea he's half correct - small amounts of progress are
relatively guaranteed to be made by someone with experience and lots of
background in the field.

However, for someone to revolutionize or fork a given field, perhaps you do
often need the inexperienced person with a different perspective...

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learc83
If you think you're interested in problem, start trying to solve it. If you
really get into it, along the way you'll become a domain expert.

At least for me, that's how I learn. Who cares if you end up solving a
different problem than the one you started with.

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jorleif
I think his advice is "good" in the sense of safe. If it is followed, it is
very likely that the student ends up in a good place professionally. But, I
think he ignores the fact that to become really good at something is not pure
grit, but something has to feed your motivation. I'm just as sceptical about
"passion" as Cal is, but at least one might need to discover some kind of
drive towards achievement. For me it seems to be a particular kind of
curiosity to "understand" something difficult, and use it to build stuff. It's
not exactly passion, but still one needs the drive, not just a direction that
when diligently pursued usually gives good results.

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jonmc12
Every member of each generation grows up and implicitly faces a decision: am I
going to follow the path of others towards success? or am I going to redefine
success? The former is for iBankers, lawyers, doctors, carrer academics and
social capitalist. The latter is for innovators.

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kiba
Ok. A thesis that sounds reasonable, except how do we test this belief and
what measuring stick?

In other words, how do we know that experience depth lead to being a
successful research scientist. What does a successful research career mean?
Discover something new and significant? Getting a teaching position? Citation?
Nobel prize in a science field?

