The title is just flame-bait. The message is: (a) being lazy will kill your startup, (b) smart people are lazy.<p>But, well, all you really need to kill a startup is (a), and we already knew that. The next possible conclusion is that maybe smart people underestimate the challenge of starting a startup, but I think everybody does. What's more critical is how people react when they realize they're in over their heads.
From Hamming's "You and Your Research":<p><pre><code> You observe that most great scientists have tremendous
drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell
Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or
four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey
was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and
I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's
office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much
as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put
his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said,
"You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know
if you worked as hard as he did that many years."
I simply slunk out of the office!
What Bode was saying was this: "Knowledge and productivity
are like compound interest." Given two people of approximately
the same ability and one person who works ten percent
more than the other, the latter will more than twice
outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you
learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more
you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much
like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate,
but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly
the same ability, the one person who manages day in and
day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be
tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took
Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my
time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I
found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like
to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect
her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect
things if you intend to get what you want done. There's
no question about this.
</code></pre>
The entire essay is well worth reading and makes many excellent points. It's been mentioned many times here on HN, and is one of the essays on PG's site:<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515</a><p><a href="http://searchyc.com/you+and+your+research+hamming?sort=by_date" rel="nofollow">http://searchyc.com/you+and+your+research+hamming?sort=by_da...</a><p>Unsurprisingly, it's all over the 'net:<p><a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22You+and+your+research%22+Hamming" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22You+and+your+research%22...</a>
For me, this is the money quote as I pasted it into my fortune file<p><pre><code> I knew there were a lot of other people as
intelligent as I was, and who had all [the
same] advantages [as me]. The only way to be
successful then would be to gain a slight
advantage over them - I had to work and
train harder than they did, I had to get to
know more people than they did, I had to
learn more about more things that they did.
We started off equals, but at some point all
the effort I put in started to pay off, and
where they stopped improving themselves, I
continued, and I got better and better.
Where they were afraid to try new things
because they would fail, I tried and I got
better and knew more, till I was good enough
for the job I hold now.
</code></pre>
I recently figured out that compounding interest works for personal development and business just as well as it works for money.
It's true that currently, some intelligent people can fail to develop a work ethic because they've found things easy.<p>However, this is not an inherent problem of intelligence; this is an inherent problem with one-size-fits-all schooling.<p>They found things easy because the difficulty level of their challenges were well below them, but that's hypothetically easy to fix; you make their challenges a little above their current level. Practically, though, it's more of problem.
people often come out of school thinking that life will apportion its challenges to meet their skill level. after all, that's the sort of designed environment they've been in since they were 5. intelligent people get caught in the trap of relative comparison: thinking that they're awesome simply because they were better than their immediate peers.<p>this is one of the big benefits of going to a "good" school. not that you're receiving a qualitatively better education, but because you're thrown together with some of the best and brightest. this resets your scale at a much higher level.<p>of course the most successful people tend to put in a supreme effort constantly without reference to any artificial scales.
That Israeli soldier had balls to take on a guy with a knife. I thought it was kinda funny and ironic that he used that situation as an analogy for intelligence.<p>The intelligent thing to do would have been to hand over the money and NOT risk being sliced open lol.
Ofer was a trained Isreli soldier dodging the knife of some local 2-bit thief...probably child's play for him. Though I think he reached a bit with the whole knife-intelligence analogy, I get what he was saying.
Nice analogy.<p>I think this is why Steve Blank talk so much about founders 'getting out of the building'. The first instinct of a highly intelligent tech nerd when faced with the challenges of a startup is to bury their head in code and not engage directly with the customer at all, i.e. focus solely on improving the product and not testing if there is a market for the product in the first place:<p><a href="http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/" rel="nofollow">http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/</a><p>Fortunately, Steve Blank has designed his 'Customer Development' roadmap to mitigate against this. For a brief, free synopsis, see:<p><a href="http://www.socrated.com/courses/4?home=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.socrated.com/courses/4?home=1</a><p>This was posted on HN recently enough, and it's brilliant. It sums up the entire Customer Devlopment roadmap quite nicely. I'd still recommend buying the book too though, also excellent.
Intelligence is hardly a knife. One can put a knife aside and try training without it to better improve the "other" skills, same is not true for intelligence. And also, isn't true intelligent people are more inclined to self-improving?
I think that declining your experiences is NOT intelligence.
I disagree that this is about IQ or intelligence. A truly intelligent person understands how little they actually know. It is only those who think they are intelligent who have they ego to think that things will always come easy.
This is definitely me, though I'm sure I'm not the only one. My laziness didn't come from simply being intelligent, but from everyone always telling me how smart I was. As a result, I was terrified to fail and disappoint. Straight A's were effortless, but I never tried anything 'risky'.<p>This all changed when I started doing start-ups. I learned to fail many, many times, but instead of quitting, I just kept trying again and again. I actually kicked my 20-something year old habit of being lazy, because the reward that comes with doing all the hard work is much greater than the fear of failure.
Sigh... this is why including an interesting and memorable anecdote often isn't a good idea. The OP has an interesting article about the relative power of innate gifts (intelligence in this case) vs hard work and effort. It's one of the major focuses of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and certainly a worth topic of discussion on HN...<p>But all anyone seems to want to talk about is the damn knife fight story. Sigh.....
This was said much better by ESR in <i>The Curse of the Gifted</i>. Yeah, I don't like ESR that much, but this time he actually said something insightful. See <a href="http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20...</a> for details.
To extend the metaphor, you must also keep the knife sharp. It's not enough to just practice and work hard and be intelligent. We must also be insightful into our own lives as humans. At least in my life, my emotional and physical state impact my productivity more than anything else. Sometimes you will see a very dedicated, intelligent person flame out or they get into personal drama and cannot focus like they used to. For me, the answer is to workout 5 days a week and make time for family and women.
To extend it to a number of recent articles about kids (summarized):<p>--------------------<p>Kids who were told "you must be smart" when they succeeded were less likely to take on harder tasks later because they might fail, and seem stupid.<p>Kids who were told "you must have worked hard" when they succeeded tackled harder problems later and ended up learning better, because they perceived greater reward for <i>doing</i> better, not <i>looking</i> better.<p>--------------------<p>If you're smart, but you don't do anything you can fail at, you won't learn. Try. Fail. Try <i>again</i>.
I agreed with this, but then I thought of the scene in Indiana Jones with the sword expert...<p>Seriously though, while I think the metaphor is a little weak, the article makes some good points.
I do not see a correlation of level of intelligence and ability to work hard, especially it cannot be said of verse correlation. I do not believe that Intelligence cases man to be lazy and less prepared for challenges. On the contrary, intelligence helps man to cope with challenges and problems if he chooses to do so and has a strong character and mostly important desire and ambitions. Intelligence helps dealing with challenges efficiently and successfully.
generally , peoples who fight to get everything done in life are more successfull than the rest, they learn really early, that life's hard, and you have to fight for everything, so meeting difficulties is just an everyday business, at the other side, peoples who always have access to everything will struggle when the first problems show up, and they just tend to give up.
Maybe 15 years ago I was watching a knife defense course,<p>the only thing I remember from that course:<p>"Respect the knife"<p>it seemed hilarious at the time, yet at the same time very apt.