

Self-examination is the Secret Ingredient for Success - fleaflicker
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/opinion/sunday/secret-ingredient-for-success.html

======
hnhg
The anecdotes here could be used to justify a range of different theories:

'Being Daring is the Secret Ingredient for Success'; 'Innovation is the Secret
Ingredient for Success'; 'Not Giving Up is the Secret Ingredient for Success'
'Giving People What They Don't Know They Want is the Secret Ingredient for
Success'

and so on... Can I have my book deal now?

EDIT: I'd also like to use this opportunity to invent the new verb "to
Gladwell", which is to make up a spurious set of keys to success using the
flimsiest of anecdotes. Hence my next book - 'Learning How to Gladwell is the
Secret Ingredient for Success'

~~~
tokenadult
Malcolm Gladwell, who has said in an interview that he writes to try out
ideas,

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html>

"Q: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?

"A: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books are
playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with. I'm
happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is different
from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You have to
be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's the fun
part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure story,
why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and provoke
them."

is good, while trying out ideas, at crediting his sources. Any reader of a
Malcolm Gladwell book (as I know, from being a reader of the book _Outliers_ )
can check the sources, and decide from there what other sources to check and
what other ideas to play with. Gladwell doesn't purport to write textbooks,
but I give him a lot of credit for finding interesting scholarly sources that
haven't had enough attention in the popular literature. He is equaled by very
few authors as a story-teller who can tie ideas together in a thought-
provoking assembly.

~~~
bambax
The problem with Gladwell is that many or most of the anecdotes he uses have
been used by others to draw different conclusions (how many times have you
read about the Tenerife disaster for example?)

I don't think Gladwell pretends to be doing science, but what he does is worse
than "non-science", it's a kind of charlatanism. He builds a thesis and then
hand-picks anecdotes to fit his preconceived narrative.

That's how chain-letters are made. (And his talent as a writer makes it
worse.)

------
pg
I don't know whether it's the secret to success, but among startups we've
funded the lack of it is almost perfectly correlated with failure.

~~~
asdfologist
If the lack of it is almost perfectly correlated with failure, then wouldn't
having it be almost perfectly correlated with success?

~~~
SatvikBeri
The vast majority of violent criminals in the USA are male, but the majority
of males are not violent criminals.

~~~
mynegation
And yet being male still almost perfectly correlates with being a violent
criminal. asdfologist probably picks on a loose use of word "correlation",
correlation is by definition symmetric. pg is really talking about conditional
probabilities, but honestly I think everyone understands what he means.

~~~
SatvikBeri
You're right-I was also thinking of conditional probabilities. I appreciate
the correction-I'm trying to learn to be more precise.

------
nathanstitt
This is something that I've struggled with my entire life - how to be honest
with myself about what my shortcomings are and how to overcome them.

For me at least, it's been incredibly difficult and at times impossible. I've
come to believe that there is something deeply rooted inside the human psyche
that refuses to completely accept that we are imperfect.

Of course this isn't always unwanted. If we didn't have a certain amount of
pure egotistical madness, how else would we attempt our dreams? The real trick
is to figure out what parts you'll have to have help with in order to get
there instead of blindly believing we can do it all.

This is probably why YC is so fixated on funding partners. You need someone
with a very high level of self-awareness to be able to tackle the challenge on
their own. I suspect that those individuals are fairly rare.

~~~
pekk
If it were just about building and doing things in a social vacuum, and you
can accept the risks of what you're doing without becoming paralyzed, there
should be no real downside to having a completely realistic feeling for your
own limits.

Here is the problem. In our business culture, if you are pitching to sell
products, get funding or get hired, then you can't export the products of your
realistic introspection. This is not effective. No one wants to hear it. And
you will be despised: if you say tepid things about yourself, people will
imagine even worse about you, and your competitors will easily make use of
this. So whether you are delusional about yourself or not, you have to export
a delusionally rosy picture of who you are and what you are doing.

If we want to stop incentivizing this, we can. But we don't.

~~~
chipsy
I believe this is why artists tend to be more self-critical. They aren't
making money(mostly) and so they're relatively free to consciously acknowledge
their limits. The boundaries, when they're encountered, tend to come from
social forces rather than market forces.

Similarly, a recurring phenomenon of financially successful artists is that
they discard their old perspective and make work without the inspiration that
powered their breakthrough.

------
gnosis
_"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed
my way to success."_ \-- Thomas Edison

 _"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives
solely in my tenacity."_ \-- Louis Pasteur

 _"Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When
I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly."_ \-- Alexander Hamilton

 _"What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it."_ \--
Doris Lessing

~~~
jackalope
Tenacity and study are certainly important in achieving your goals, but self-
examination is crucial in determining if those goals are indeed worthwhile.

~~~
gnosis
Indeed, as Socrates said, _"the unexamined life is not worth living."_ And
_"know thyself"_ was the inscription over the temple at Delphi.

------
jakeonthemove
It's not self-examination, it's taking action based on that self-examination,
which is much more difficult to do...

Most people don't want to face their shortcomings, but of those who do, even
fewer actually take the action necessary for success...

------
burningion
I started meditating consistently a few months ago, and it has led to some
huge breakthroughs for myself. I can't recommend meditation enough as a way to
take a step back from the hurried need to do something, and to really think
deeply on every aspect of your approach.

Shameless self promotion:

I was measuring my meditation with an Arduino for the first 3 months and built
a meditation app to help people get started meditating. If you have a
Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor, the app also tracks your heart rate variance
to let you know when you've entered a meditative state.

buddhamindapp.com

------
levlandau
"People who are right a lot often change their minds"--Jeff Bezos It seems
this is a corollary of the principle of self examination.

There's certainly some personality trait (e.g. intelligence/experience) that's
more fundamental than a propensity for self examination. Not sure what it
is...but it's the difference between knowing when to stick to something and
knowing when to draw the opposite conclusions from your self-examination.

------
bjourne
The world is full of successful narcissists and psychopaths. Not the most
introspective types, so how do they do it? A better predictor for
successfulness is how successful your parents was. That is the only theory I
know of that can explain how George W Bush became president.

------
yorak
Ray Dalio, the founder of the investment firm Bridgewater Associates includes
self-examination, honesty and introspection as one of the key ingredients in
getting what you want from life.

I take the article as another datapoint to support his theory.

A good read:
[http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...](http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgewater-
Associates-Ray-Dalio-Principles.pdf)

------
KaoruAoiShiho
This is just yet another thing computers / AI will be better than humans at.

------
asdfologist
... So you need to know what you're doing wrong in order to do something
right. Groundbreaking.

~~~
to3m
If you're already stopping to think what _you_ 're doing wrong, you're
probably already on the right track, and this article might be a bit basic for
you :)

Some people can be surprisingly unwilling to even imagine that they're doing
anything wrong at all. They routinely assume that difficulties they encounter
are the product of external factors, and never stop to even wonder whether the
cause is their own sub-optimal decisions.

------
darec1
Omg, I knew there was a secret ingredient!

