Like it, but wish the author had done this without so much braggadocio. It could have been done the same way without so much self-reference and would have come off better, IMO.
> Like it, but wish the author had done this without so much braggadocio. It could have been done the same way without so much self-reference and would have come off better, IMO.
You know I see this sometimes and I'm not sure it's a good thing - a person describes their achievements tangibly and concrete, and then someone says, "You're bragging!"
I got three thoughts on that -
1. It's a damn shame that people can't talk about their achievements in tangible, concrete terms without somebody whipping out the b-label. I mean, the author just posted his schedule and how much he sacrificed, and shared some encouragement for people wondering if they're not normal, and shared a good quote and a video. That's not empty braggadocio, no way.
2. This creates a strange sort of culture where the high status thing to do is to be all nonchalant and indifferent, and it's impossible to tell who is full of shit and who isn't. Earlier today, there was the "dealing with hostile lawyers" post, and a bunch of people said, "Who is this joker? Don't take his advice." But that joker happens to be a self-made millionaire with a crazy-good track record. But if he mentions "My win-loss record is literally 100% in this area" he'd get hit with the brag label again.
3. When someone says, "you're bragging!" - I think that reflects more on the person saying it than the original author. C'mon guys, celebrate when someone wins. Winning is good. Sheesh.
Reminds me of the world in The Giver, where bringing up anything outside of Sameness was socially taboo, and even compliments were frowned upon because they might make someone uncomfortable.
I actually believe pride is a virtue if there is substance to back up that sentiment. I get a little miffed at the "aww, shucks, it's nothing " mentality from truly talented people.
It probably comes down to personality type as to whether you are comfortable with this sort of message wrapped in self promotion. I thought it was an effective piece, but it would have been more effective if someone else had written it about him.
And by the way, don't hate me because I'm beautiful.
Poor boy, he doesn't have a life, never plays a video game, never go to the movies, doesn't have a girlfriend, all he has is the satisfaction to be a winner, let him brag :)
I am a winner because I do almost whatever I want, most of the time. I don't leave for the office until 10:30; I keep time to read books, work on Beethoven's sonatas, and run outdoors. I don't give a f*ck about money, rewards and other people opinion. Find your inner winner!
Why do people always assume that being impressive and having a life are mutually exclusive? I kind of consider myself something of a winner (top school, top job, blah blah blah), and I've certainly busted my ass to get here, but I've also had a lot of beers, seen movies, dated girls, played [American] football, etc.
At the end of the day, I'm unconvinced that you can be a "winner" without doing all of it. I'm not completely convinced that the author is the huge virginal dork you made him out to be, but if it makes you feel better about your inner winner, more power to you, I guess.
I found the "bragging" interesting, because I scored higher than him on the SATs with zero test prep, and made All-State orchestra despite having quit violin lessons three years before and barely practiced in the last year.
We all have things that we're good at. Mine just happened to be the stuff that looks great on a college app at age 19.
Luck has a way of balancing itself out, though. I struggled mightily at fitting in with peers when I was in school, and I've struggled hard to do high-quality original creative work since. Haven't quite gotten the hang of either, while meanwhile there're people who create world-changing products like FaceBook and GMail and Google Maps within a couple years of getting out of college.
> "Why do people always assume that being impressive and having a life are mutually exclusive?"
They're not. But they are IMHO highly correlated - I feel like I was a good example of it in high school and the first bit of college. Textbook Asian academic overachiever, below-average social skills, and little of my life that others might consider interesting besides my unrelenting ability to code. It took a lot of work to leave that version of me behind, and much of that came from sacrificing academic performance. Absolutely no regrets about that.
That said, I think wazoox was out of line extrapolating the author's life like that. We simply don't know enough about the guy to make a judgment in one way or another.
Besides, doesn't his own point about finding your inner winner involve not caring about alleged overachievers?
I think it's because people who "have a life" (i.e. are down-to-earth people who get along with everyone and have lots of friends, etc) don't care about being impressive. I mean, do you like being friends with or even being around people whose lives are motivated by the need to impress you? I doubt it.
Seems like a lot of people on this thread don't understand that to really feel like (and as far as I am concerned, be) a winner, you need to stop looking for external validation. Constantly allowing yourself to seek it out or fantasize about it is just building a habit of feeling unfulfilled and insecure.
> I'm not completely convinced that the author is the huge virginal dork you made him out to be ...
I don't think he's such a dork, just joking, ... FTW ? All of this sounds so young, and that's OK. I attained some "achievements" myself at times but it feels so vain in the end, 10 or 15 years later. I even remember that funny hormonal boost called pride, but now I'm looking down at my former self, I can't even long for this anymore. Maybe I'm just getting old.
What I don't like is when, using startups as an example, someone put in regular days and be beaten by their competition who did say an extra 20 hours a week. As long as people know they can't always have it both ways.
I realize that I came off a little strong in the article but it was to raise a point. I could have referenced more about others - clearly Richard Branson, Lance Armstrong and PG have done abnormal and extraordinary things to get to where they are. But I know much less about them and feel much less qualified to talk about them.
I do know that my life has certainly not followed a "normal" path and that when I was younger, I resented that fact. Now I don't. I do know something about winning and I wanted to share that with people.
I think you should be honored for your honest reporting of your life's path and your willingness to share your advice, not criticized. We could benefit from having a lot more of people telling their own stories instead of speculating about other people's.
I concur. The accomplishments mentioned were of the "I was an exceptional high-school student" variety and hence don't necessarily inspire jealousy from an adult. Perhaps if he'd closed with "and now I'm a jet-setting playboy" I'd have been put off.
I don't agree. His own personal experience is really the whole point here.
He's stating his credentials, which is important — lots of people are happy to offer advice on how to "be successful" or "win", and that advice is contradictory. As an empiricist, I think it's very useful to examine the results they report from applying that advice in their own lives in order to figure out what its results are likely to be if I apply it in my own.
Of course, people's reports of their personal experience are not perfectly reliable, but they're a lot more reliable than their ability to accurately derive explanatory theories from their personal experience.
As far as I can tell, the achievement Jason Shen is most proud of is working, as a non-founder, at a six-person startup that sells ads. If you dig a bit, it turns out he also cofounded a microfinance group in 2007 that has lent US$24,000 over the last three years, but says, "Microfinance isn't a panacea. We don't think of ourselves as changing the world. We're just making it a bit chewier." As far as I know, the difference between traditional low-income loan-sharking (you know, payday loans and so on) and microfinance is specifically the intention to change the world. (On the plus side, they do claim they're working to "end poverty" but I can't find any description of their actual program on their website. At first I thought http://gumballcapital.org/challenge/qanda/question/8/ meant they were making high-interest loans to undergraduates at elite US universities, but it seems more likely that the "Challenge" is a way for them to solicit donations, not their actual program.)
In short, nothing Jason Shen has accomplished so far in his life will be remembered a century from now, unless he becomes famous for something he does in the future.
To me, this provides a very valuable lesson: you can work insanely hard for years and years, practicing and studying 17 hours a day, and even think you're an expert on "winning", without ever achieving anything significant. Hard work is not enough.
You seem to assume (or at least imply) that being famous and being remembered is the definition of winning, but I must disagree.
Winning only means something within context, but as a broad rule of thumb it can be taken as a rough synonym for success in achieving the stated goals. If someone sets out to make the world better, and the world is actually better because of them, even if only slightly, then I would call that both success and winning.
Well, it's true that the first and most important thing is to ensure that the sign of your overall effect on the world is positive, not negative, before you attend to increasing its magnitude. But you don't need to train 17 hours a day to achieve that; more than anything, you just need to be in the right circumstances, so that the everyday living of your life helps the commonweal rather than hurting it.
Thanks for your thoughts kragen and of course considering what "results" I've achieved with the advice I've offered is a very good idea.
I did reference mostly high school achievements because that's when I felt like my life was the most not normal. Probably my biggest "claim to fame" on winning is that I was the co-captain of the 2009 NCAA Championship winning Men's Gymnastics team after 14 "dry" years.
I'm fine with not being remembered a century from now by most people. I mean, how many Presidents can you list off from the late 1800's/early 1900's? I'd be much happier if I could make a decent-sized positive impact on the world in my own lifetime than becoming some kind of legendary figure.
Your gymnastics achievements are pretty cool, I have to admit. I wish I’d ever had a body like yours; I can barely touch my nose to my knee without bending it, and I still can’t do a simple handstand, even backed by a wall. And it’s a huge step up from many, many high-schoolers who spent those same thousands of hours playing Mario 64, getting drunk, and screwing.
With regard to high-school achievements, though, what do you think of Julian Assange, Jon Lech Johansen, William Kamkwamba, and Aaron Swartz, who were high-school-aged at about the same time you were? When they were 14-18 years old, they disrupted overseas nuclear research; enabled free software to play DVDs; electrified their town with a windmill built from scrap; and contributed to defining RSS, published a standards-track RFC on RDF, and defined the Creative Commons metadata standards; respectively.
(I’m not saying this to make you feel bad. My own achievements in high school consisted of learning calculus, learning a little about the internet, and not getting anybody pregnant.)
It’s true that most presidents from a hundred years ago are forgettable. I can list quite a number of people from before 1910, though — let’s say people who had a substantial impact in the 1890–1910 period: off the top of my head, Edison, his assistant Dickson, Tesla, Bell, Michelson, Morley, Einstein, Carnegie, Hollerith, Curie, Becquerel, Röntgen, Hearst, Gandhi, Jack London, Mark Twain, Darrow, Susan B. Anthony, and Cixi.
Looking these folks up, here are their achievements during that time. I deleted a couple from the list above because they didn’t achieve anything significant during that time.
Edison: funded the invention of motion-picture cameras and projectors and did some of the inventing. First commercial film piracy in 1902. Electrocuted an elephant in 1903 to publicize the dangers of AC electricity. Developed first commercially practical fluoroscope, killing his assistant Dally in the process. Invented prefabricated concrete buildings. (He did a bunch of other stuff, but that was before 1890.)
Dickson: led the team that did most of the inventing, founded the first film studio.
Röntgen: discovered X-rays, received a Nobel prize.
Tesla: supposedly discovered the skin damage caused by X-rays before Röntgen discovered the rays, invented RF oscillators, built the first (?) radio, maybe invented transformers, built a radio-controlled boat, fought for AC, supposedly invented ignition coils and spark plugs, invented AND gates (?), invented the bladeless turbine, built history’s largest Tesla coil, went broke and somewhat mad. (Too bad I didn’t think of Bose, Marconi, J.P. Morgan, or De Forest off the top of my head.)
Bell: led the Bell Telephone Company, built hydrofoils, commercialized the phonograph.
Michelson: made improvements in the manufacture of diffraction gratings. Michelson grating ruling engines are still in use today. (His famous experiment with Morley was in 1887, and his high-precision measurements of the speed of light were even earlier.)
Morley: Replicated the Michelson-Morley experiment to much higher precision with Miller.
Einstein: in 1905, published papers explaining the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy.
Carnegie: prevented the annexation of Cuba, launched Carnegie Steel Company, sold it for US$225 million, founded public libraries all over the US and UK, founded half of CMU, founded TIAA-CREF, failed to settle the Homestead Strike, which ended up killing a number of people.
Hollerith: founded one of the four companies that would eventually merge to become IBM and led the technical development of tabulating machines.
Curie: discovered that radioactivity made air conductive, discovered that thorium was radioactive, discovered polonium and radium, invented the word “radioactivity”, received a Nobel prize and many other awards.
Becquerel: discovered radioactivity, received a Nobel prize, died.
Röntgen: discovered X-rays, received the first Nobel prize in physics and several other awards.
Hearst: co-invented yellow journalism with Pulitzer, founded a national political party, and (again with Pulitzer) started the Spanish-American War, initiating US imperialism.
Gandhi: was accepted to the bar, failed at establishing a law practice, moved overseas, founded the Natal Indian Congress, led civil-rights activism in South Africa, survived a lynching attempt, organized a volunteer ambulance corps to support the British war effort against the Zulus, began to abandon his racist beliefs, gave up sex, and invented satyagraha.
London: got arrested for being a Socialist, and wrote The Call of the Wild, The Unparalleled Invasion, To Build a Fire, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, all of which are still read today.
Darrow: represented Debs in the Pullman Strike case, once successfully and once unsuccessfully; helped organize the Populist Party; successfully defended Big Bill Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone; published his first book.
Twain: wrote Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Mysterious Stranger, Letters from the Earth, his autobiography, and a vicious literary criticism of the Leatherstocking series that’s better reading than the Leatherstocking series itself; did a six-year around-the-world lecture tour; survived a depression when everyone he loved died; introduced Helen Keller to the rich benefactor who paid for her education; became VP of the American Anti-Imperialist League; received an honorary doctorate; died.
Anthony: created the National American Woman Suffrage Association; worked for universal adult female suffrage in the US until six years before hear death. She succeeded 14 years after her death.
Cixi: led a coup d’état against her nephew, the emperor Guangxu, bringing herself to power, and later poisoned him with arsenic; abolished the imperial examination system; and, through political miscalculation, ended 268 years of Qing Dynasty rule in China and 2133 years of imperial rule in China; but kept China independent.
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So, I don't think it's hopeless to try to achieve things that will be remembered in 100 years. People do it every year. It's just that getting elected president isn't a particularly effective way to do it.
Great list and I admire all those people. My point was that becoming the President is an exceptionally difficult and highly recognized achievement and yet many Presidents are forgotten.
I certainly don't think it's hopeless to become 100 year memory - it'd be awesome if that happens and I think I have a higher than average chance at doing so. But I will deem my life successful (and consider myself a winner) if I achieve much more moderate goals. That's a personal choice that we all have to make about how we approach living.
You are right. Hard work is not enough. To be famous one has to mail bombs to professors or gun down people on a University campus. I'm not being facetious because there are plenty of people in academia or art committing "martyrdom" just as radical when they are simply producing crap as crappy as the next guy. I would even raise the stake higher and say that either you nor I will be remembered a century from now, but the difference is that I don't give a shit. Being remembered a century from now is not enough.
