

Make things - razin
http://caterina.net/wp-archives/98

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swombat
Very interesting, but somewhat misleading, imho.

People who go their own way may well become leaders, simply because to go your
own way you have to be decisive, and most people are indecisive, and in times
of uncertainty they will look to people who are decisive to take the lead.

But that doesn't mean that the qualities listed are leadership qualities. I'd
say that the ability to understand and empathise with people, to figure out
what they want, the ability to motivate others to do their best, the ability
to communicate convincingly, and the ability to make decisions under pressure
- all those are way more important than the ones listed in the quote.

Of the list of leadership qualities:

> _courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness,
> determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and
> clear head even when things are going badly_

I'd argue that only the last one is really a requirement for leadership. All
the others make for a better leader, but they are not requirements.

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jacobolus
Yay, you and she have different definitions of “leader”.† So what?

† You’re talking about people in charge of organizations, whereas she is
talking about people who come up with new ideas, new inventions. These are
very different sorts of leadership. Lorenzo de’ Medici vs. Machiavelli, or
some university department chair vs. Darwin, or Steve Ballmer vs. Don Knuth,
&c. Sometimes these qualities overlap, as in Caesar, say, or Steve Jobs.

Also, decisiveness is not the primary factor: there are plenty of decisive
people who never possess anything like the “leadership” she’s talking about.

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swombat
So, you're saying leadership is not about leading people?

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stdbrouw
Aye. There's a sense in which being an inventor or an intellectual that pushes
a culture forward is "leadership", but we have other words for that, we call
those people visionaries or influential thinkers or a force in society and
lots of other things too. Trying to appropriate the word "leadership" when
there are so many other positive ways to describe the qualities of an
independent thinker or maker is a bit silly.

~~~
swombat
You could even call it "thought leadership" without impinging on the wider
sense of "leadership".

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grappler
I especially connected with the bit about "fear of missing out", and with her
earlier post (linked in the article) on that subject.

When I started playing with computers in elementary and middle school, it
helped me put aside some of the trivial things that were important to my peer
group at the time, like wearing the right brands or being seen with the right
people. Technology was about making a better world, sharpening useful skills,
and attacking hard problems that used to be impossible to solve.

The connection between people that technology has brought over the last couple
decades is awesome for a great many reasons. I doubt I need to defend that
point.

The biggest downside though, for me, is the invasion of the messiness of the
social world into the idealism of the tech world. It bothers me when I go to
an event that is ostensibly a "hackathon" or some similarly maker-oriented
affair, and the mood is not unlike high school, or hollywood, or a nightclub.
Many of the people there are paying acute attention to signals of status from
others, and working on sending the right signals of status themselves.

It is my impression that motivations like elevating one's social status, and
fear of missing out, are the primary things bringing most people into the
world of technology today.

Improving the world, solving hard problems, and making things seem to be lower
on the list. I'm sure communities focusing on these things are still thriving,
but they seem to be getting harder to find, because the status seekers can be
pretty good at adopting the lingo of the idealists.

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wccrawford
I absolutely disagree with that quote about leadership.

If you aren't leading people, you aren't a leader. It's right in the name. If
you're going your own direction, alone, you're a pioneer. But not a leader.

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dkrich
Yes, but how do you gain the respect of people who follow you? It's by doing
something that piques their interest and inspires them. You don't wake up one
day and have people searching you out to hear what you have to say because you
are a "leader." It's because you have done something that has inspired them,
and I think that's more what this is about.

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swombat
You'd think that, but actually, that's exactly what film directors do, and I
think we can all agree that they are de-facto "leaders".

Film directors become directors because they go around and tell people "I'm a
director putting a movie together, do you want to work with me/invest in
me/help me?" not because they work hard at unrelated task X and somehow become
promoted to the rank of directors.

Leadership at its best...

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Alex3917
Film directors become directors because they go around and tell people 'I'm a
director putting a movie together, do you want to work with me/invest in
me/help me?'

Isn't that usually the job of the executive producer?

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KZMcPherson
Invigorating. I am one that got lost in all of the noise. Now 27 an just about
to find my footing and get on track to be what I am suppose to be and that is
"The One Which is Me". Since I was young I longed for the recognition that
come to so many these days yet I have been chasing it in the wrong way. As you
say her I really need to focus on making thing and get back to what really
makes me happy which is studying what make enterprise business so successful
and bringing back to the mom and pop that can barley turn on their own
computer. I do this not to have the superiority complex, but to help those
whom are lost in the riff of today and cannot find the way to the next stage
and or the right person to actually want to help them and not just cash their
check and go. thank you for helping to reset my mindset back where is needs to
be .

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antirez
Can't agree more. Another symptom of the same issue is that the Internet
startup scene is becoming auto referential as hell.

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revorad
Auto referential in what way?

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antirez
Talking/caring more about the scene itself instead of the actual goal that
should be building real innovation (and getting money as a side effect and not
as primary goal).

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hrabago
To some degree, I feel the same way.

I look at what people had created and in between the thoughts of "this is
cool", "this is boring", and "why didn't anyone think of this before?",
there's a sense of inspiration that someone has created something and people
are using it now. (I also get something similar to NIH, but I've learned
through the years to mostly ignore that.)

I get a lot of joy in using software to allow people to do something new,
something better than they had done before, or just to make their everyday
life a little bit easier.

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missy
Forgot to post my comment here last time:

<http://caterina.net/wp-archives/98#comment-7988>

I can only comment from my experiences in Berlin,Germany but what I ve found
here that many people here read books / watch movies of “How to…. ” or
someone’ story to sucess and use it as a carbon copy of how to suceed.

I think people like to hide behind big names, like if you criticse them ” well
Bill Gates did that” so like trying to use someone else mask to make you
immune from critique. I think also this whole speech using figures and big
names as well is a form of name dropping, its like ” im in their league / I m
part of their crowd / take me serious” . To me it only shows who they want to
be but who they are not at this very moment.

The shame is the “doing / creating ” aspect gets them to the state that they
present themselves. So in this creatlve period, with no current exiting model
template to follow, you need to strike out with something new, so if you are
actually a new guy acting like you made it, well not much will happen.

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chexton
Despite the potential conflict surrounding the leadership quote provided in
the post I found that overall the post resonated with me.

As someone starting down the entrepreneurial path I have found that it's easy
to get caught up reading the countless startup news sources, scouring endless
books on how to succeed or attending the large number of conferences pitched
at people like me. All have their merit in moderation but, particularly as
someone who has decided to bootstrap my current startup, I find I get the most
done and feel the best about what I'm doing when I focus on what my startup is
building and how we're building it, rather than getting caught up in "all that
noise".

In writing it down here it seems pretty obvious that focusing on what you're
building should be the priority but it can be surprisingly easy to lose focus.

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badclient
_But I want to hear about things out there that they love. About loving the
thing they’re building. There’s less of that._

Just because lots more folks know about valuations and are connected does not
mean that they are not building stuff.

This holier than thou post by Caterina actually just sounds like nostalgic
rambling.

 _Let’s get excited and make things._

This line, from the perspective she delivers it, is almost criminal. Most of
us are nerds and have no problem building stuff. We do have a problem making
money off it so kudos if we are building a little less and figuring out more
about how to make money by charging or flipping(Caterina should know about
this?)

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wpietri
> Just because lots more folks know about valuations and are connected does
> not mean that they are not building stuff.

It's not necessarily so, but there's some correlation. Startups are
fashionable now in a way they haven't been since Bubble 1.0. At meetups I
definitely have talked with people who seem more interested in worldly success
than raw creation.

The upside of this current wave is that startup costs are so low that it's
also sucking in a lot of makers who otherwise would have ended up employees.

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wyclif
Perhaps I could take this "make things" post seriously if the things made and
shouted out ( _cough_ Flickr) could go the distance and remain viable. Did
Flickr have a good run? Sure. But it seems to me there's a problem inherent in
cashing out your company and moving on to the next thing. The Internet is
littered with the corpses of once-great companies.

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wpietri
Seriously? You're discounting this because she _only_ created Flickr? (And
Hunch, and whatever she's working on now?)

I was working on my own startup at the same time Flickr was created; the
funding climate then was brutal. Flickr was expensive to run, and growing like
crazy. This was before things like AWS, so scaling was much harder. Selling to
a large company with the ability to scale it easily may have been their only
option. So I doubt it was a matter of cashing out.

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kanamekun
I totally agree. Flickr was started 7.5 years ago. Believe it or not, things
like storage and bandwidth used to be a lot more expensive. And with costs so
high, monetization often required your own dedicated ad sales force.

It's amazing to me how quickly people can take the last decade or so for
granted. Back when I started my first company, we had to buy a PBX and even
install our own mail servers. Uphill, in the snow, both ways!!

