Get skilled

2015.10.05 - One of the interesting things I'm noticing about working remotely every day is that it's giving me practice at being productive without having the normal cues around me (like having my boss right next to me). This is making me wonder if the kind of freelancing that Ev Williams was doing before / while he started Blogger gave him some useful training that helped him be productive once he was on his own.

- You're going to have to be good at what you're doing, but you may not have to be a world-class expert [although that certainly seems to help a lot]. You may be able to find others who are really good at things that you are just OK at.

Examples:
- Mark Zuckerberg was a good programmer but not a world-class expert.
- Eminem was probably a good rapper before he teamed up with the Bass brothers but I have a feeling they may have contributed a lot to his style.
- George Lucas was a good director when he started making Star Wars but the final product was largely a result of the amazing team he had assembled.
- Stephen Bax, who seems to have made great progress decoding the Voynich Manuscript (a mysterious book written in an unknown language) had obviously spent many years learning many different languages and the history of different civilizations before he was able to solve the problem of decoding the manuscript. Watch his presentation and think about what kind of background knowledge he would have needed to make the intellectual leaps he makes:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpZD_3D8_WQ. For example, he knew how Hieroglyphics and Linear B had been decoded, and he knew that many ancient languages had very similar ways of saying the same word (like the names of plants), and he knew about the research that other academics had done on the book, like identifying the different plants it showed. That kind of knowledge takes years of work.
- Henry Ford:

...from the time I saw that road engine as a boy of twelve right forward to to-day, my great interest has been in making a machine that would travel the roads. Driving to town I always had a pocket full of trinkets--nuts, washers, and odds and ends of machinery. Often I took a broken watch and tried to put it together. When I was thirteen I managed for the first time to put a watch together so that it would keep time. By the time I was fifteen I could do almost anything in watch repairing--although my tools were of the crudest. There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made--and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains he will apply those ideas.

Source: Henry Ford, "My Life and Work"

- The maker of Gunpoint (a successful indie videogame) stressed the importance of trying the games that people are talking about so that you can understand what it is that attracts people to them (which can help you make your own games better). This seems to be exactly Henry Ford's advice above.
- Palmer Luckey of Oculus VR repaired iPhones and modded videogame systems before getting into VR: http://www.wired.com/2014/05/oculus-rift-4/

If there’s a checklist for tech wunderkind, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey leaves no box unticked. There’s the shoelessness, for one; he commutes in sandals and regularly pads barefoot around the Oculus offices in Irvine, California. There’s the tousled hair, the anachronistic attachment to his 75-mpg 2001 Honda Insight, the can of vitamin-enriched sparkling blackberry juice seemingly glued to his hand, and the confidence that comes from knowing a lot of things about a lot of things (or possibly from all that juice).

But most of all, there’s the omnivorous curiosity. As a home-schooled teenager in Southern California, Luckey spent much of his free time tinkering with electronics—modding videogame consoles and repairing iPhones for extra cash, then spending the money on high-powered laser systems and upgrades for his gaming PC. The PC, in particular, became an obsession: Luckey found himself pouring tens of thousands of dollars into it. And soon, a hunt for 3-D monitors became a search for true immersion. As a kid, he’d been entranced by the idea of getting inside the videogames he played on his Gameboy Color. Virtual-world sci-fi like The Matrix and the anime show Yu-Gi-Oh! intensified the desire. Why, he asked himself, can’t we do that yet?

His modding and iPhone repair work had left him with a lot of money, so he bought a $400 Vuzix iWear VR920, then the most cutting-edge consumer VR headset—enthusiasts call them HMDs, for head-mounted displays—on the market. Then he moved on to the more expensive eMagin Z800 3DVisor. And he kept looking. Over time, through a combination of government auctions and private resellers, he would spend the money once earmarked for PC upgrades on more than 50 different units, building what he touts as the largest private collection in the world.

2014.09 - If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else
http://philosophyforprogrammers.blogspo ... -work.html
- Examples: Felix Dennis, Warren Buffett,
- Counter-examples: Duncan Bannatyne, Richard Branson(? does working for his mother count?),