I wish this was true. Yet, I think we all have some skin in the game to why this article rings false.
When it comes to getting an advantage, people often look the other way at meanness.
For example, it’s easy to complain about how Amazon treats their employees. Yet, we choose to buy from Amazon because it’s convenient, cheap, and everyone else is doing it.
We might see an organization treat someone else unfairly but when resources are scarce, we often look the other way because it feels like there is nothing one person can do.
I like the old black and white movie, The Invisible Man, to demonstrate the situation of a specific type of meanness that seems ever present today. The enemy is invisible and is only defeated when the entire community gets involved.
I don't think Amazon treats their employees badly. Warehouse workers aren't compensated like software engineers, but what do you expect?
I'm sure there are shitty managers at Amazon (in warehouses and in software) but by and large I believe blue collar Amazon workers have it about as well as blue collar workers everywhere. Maybe better.
The issue isn't about pay. It's about measuring so aggressively and turning the screws until you extract every last bit of value out of someone.
If a company is measuring the duration and frequency of bathroom breaks (to pick one of many examples that's been highlighted in the press), something has gone fundamentally wrong.
What if I mentioned to you that a solid chunk of those employees could be given a couple of shares of stock that made a few lucky people billionaires - some that still work there - and it would be a life-changing amount of money?
In addition to some truly gnarly stories / conditions and their staunch anti-Union stance it is also a relativity issue. There is much to go around but it’s not always spread around with consideration for your employees. And there really isn’t a good reason for that in my opinion.
I hear the argument “well I guess they don’t deliver as much value / leverage for the company as others”. I get it, but at a certain point that rings as a completely hollow and greedy justification. Where that is for you is subjective. But for me? Where there are billionaires there is room for generosity.
It is very time consuming, tiring and takes effort to do principled shopping. For most people, convenience and price are more important than principles. I can’t think of many (any?) big companies that I’d be happy to give my money to, they all behave badly - only question is the degree to which each one behaves badly.
This isn’t complaining, just pointing out the reality - we actually don’t have as many options as we think we do. If one has extra money, they can spend a little more and shop at smaller but expensive places, most people are going to shop at Walmart or Amazon
Exactly what I was thinking as I was tapping the thread link, strange to see the exact same words on the screen a second later.
Either what pg considers means is radically different from what I consider mean, or we have different things in mind when thinking about success, or he lives in a different world.
Several counter examples immediately come to mind, and not only in the startup world. Granted, it's probably easier today than in 2014 but still. It feels utterly naive. The whole piece. For instance:
> Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending.
Well, sure, if eliminating all your competitors by burning investor cash and if breaking the law left and right or disregarding ethics or the environment is considered transcending and not attacking or being mean. Now, maybe that stuff is considered fair game in pg's world.
This works great in an orderly society, where most of the really mean stuff has already been successfully disincentivized, often at great cost. Out in the jungle, it takes dozens to hundreds of years to grow a tree, but only a few minutes to cut it down.
If the successful people you meet in real life are nice and you see lots of meanness on the internet, it probably just means that anonymity causes meanness.
Or that the internet is full of mean losers. Your premise assumes anyone with an internet connection is successful and I very much doubt that assumption holds water.
Not really - I've seen some pretty mean people back in high school, because high school is one of the places where people are forced to be together, no matter what their preferences are.
But once one becomes an adult, there is a much greater leeway in choosing whom to interact with, so it is often possible to not interact with mean people at all.
Wait. There are people who aren't individually educated by private tutors while they accompany their parents on travel, and at their summer, and winter homes throughout the globe? /s
Everyone talking about this being out of touch with the present and how figures in proximity to Graham don’t fit the description of nice he’s referring to should think about this passage:
> For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.
> That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.
What’s changed?
Edit:
The paragraph after should be included also, I think
Has anything changed? He's not correct about the past metric always being about zero-sum games. Railroads are pretty obviously not zero-sum, and wars are generally negative-sum. How many successful merchants existed in ancient times? I'm sure there were plenty.
And there's plenty of zero-sum in success today. Politics is the most obvious example. I can't be a Senator without excluding someone else from being a Senator. Your startup might be creating value, but the funding it needs is funding that can't go to other startups. The economy is not zero-sum because things have different value to different people, but money is zero-sum aside from banks playing tricks.
The idea is patently absurd in any case. There are plenty of successful mean people out there, including one extremely successful mean person who became particularly successful after this essay was written and is so notorious that I don't even have to name him for you to know who I'm talking about.
This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to.
I accept that the successful people pg knows are nice to him. Maybe they're even nice in general. But extrapolating that to "being mean makes you fail" is absurd.
Let’s disregard your first three paragraphs that treat his point about zero-sum games categorically. He does hedge against that interpretation in the passages I referenced.
> This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to.
Think about the names tied to Graham, the ones who appear in this very essay even. I think you’re making a gross understatement here—a slight even—of the massive influence of the likes of Dan Gackle.
Sorry, I don't really know what point you're making. I have no idea what "the massive influence of the likes of Dan Gackle" is referring to. Does he do something important besides run HN? Because running HN is important to the likes of us, but is utterly insignificant for the wider world.
He’s saying growth mindsets “win” and zero-sum players, the mean ones, stagnate. This is true as a system— who wants to invest with someone intent on gouging you— and it’s true as a function of effort— if you spend your time on petty tricks and tactics, you will, in the long run, “grow” very little.
Sadly, even if accurate, the exceptions (i.e. mean people who get power) can have an outsized impact because they don't respect norms and boundaries that prevent the worst abuses.
Also some strategies I'd call "mean" can be very effective: predatory pricing, monopolization, regulatory capture, disregarding externalities, lying, fraud, etc.
Thank you. I agree. Paul's general insight is probably true on an 80/20 split, but those who are sociopathic enough can and do wield power without any care for the destruction or disruption they cause. They can even get off on it. See: Trump, Sam Altman, etc.
It may be that successful mean people just hide it well enough to seem nice and the "x-ray vision" of the author's wife doesn't work on everyone. Once a mean person's position is unassailable, the velvet gloves come off. Alternatively, money is power and power corrupts.
The current crop of billionaires are at the pinnacle of success (depending on how you define it), but most sure don't seem very nice, and that's with a large PR team working overtime to hide the meanness.
Right. Highly successful people are rarely mean in the crudest and most obvious ways, like punching somebody unprovoked. But there's nothing stopping them from being broadly callous, or screwing over people who are in no position to fight back.
Oh no, people are mean to me :-O. I mean, sure, we can talk about sociopaths and whatnot, who may or may not have their means, but do we need such role models? Ends, not means. Kant?
I like Paul Graham a lot but this is simply not true.
Look at the most successful people of recent times and you will quickly see a consistent pattern of meanness when you dig into how they work with others:
- Steve Jobs
- Bill Gates
- Elon Musk
- Sam Altman
- Etc.
But didn't all those people you list fail at the end of the day?
Bill Gates is not just unfaithful, he even considered slipping his wife STD medication to avoid having to talk about his state of affairs. He's now alone and the only people willing to care for him are probably very few old friends he didn't alienate, yet. The rest is just after his money.
Steve Jobs was an infamously bad father and husband, just as Elon Musk and they both suffered from it. Elon Musks own daughter is attacking him online. Think about that.
Elon Musk is on top of that a seriously pathetic individual. That is pretty obvious, isn't it.
Sam Altman ... I mean, just the accusations are so cringe and ignominious.
None of those people strike me as authentically happy and fulfilled. They all overstepped the mark and paid for it dearly or are in the process of doing so. They all suffered from their habits of being reckless and lacking compassion.
If failing for you means being broke or "not rich", then yes. But that would be a very narrow interpretation. Certainly not mine. I seriously pity all of them.
Steve Jobs was certainly flawed and his personal relationships extremely complicated, but I would recommend reading the memoir his daughter wrote, Small Fry as it provides a more firsthand, nuanced perspective into Jobs as a father and partner. Compared to Elon, Steve would be father of the year.
You're probably right. But then he is wrong anyway. Almost all the famous founders of the most successful companies the US produced are or have been infamously mean. Sometimes they had more likeable co-fouders like Paul Allen or Wozniak, but his little opinion piece falls flat nonetheless. He is contradicting himself in his own self-righteous thought bubble. I just chose not to participate.
It's PG, the definition of the sort of success he advocates in the startup world is "accumulated a lot of money, influence and kudos" and those guys are outlying successes in those areas, regardless of issues in their personal life and how many people detest some of them.
Sure, there are normies with greater levels of personal happiness (as well as plenty of nice normies who also managed to fall out with significant people in their lives for one reason or another), but I don't think PG is likely to consider them higher achievers, even if they're significantly more secure and happy in their career than some of those individuals.
Their companies are all doing well (although I think the jury is out on OpenAI). So did they fail? Graham seems to measure a person's success by the success of their company.
>Elon Musks own daughter is attacking him online. Think about that.
If you read Walter Isaacson's book on Musk it's pretty clear that his kids do love him, he does care for them well, and that his "daughter" fell into pretty extremist ideology.
IMO, Isaacson isn't the most objective biographer and his sourcing tends to be pretty awful. I don't trust anything he's written about contemporary people and I'm still disappointed that the access Steve Jobs gave him was seemingly squandered.
Look her up on TikTok, she’s not mentally well. Extreme leftist ideology is what I’m talking about.
You should read the book, it’s pretty good. Isaacson is not at all biased towards Musk, he has a lot of critical things to say about him. The author is one of the most trusted and thorough biographers of his generation and is known for extensive primary-source research.
This verge article is cope, they are a very politically biased organization. Linking to them is the equivalent of me linking to Fox News and trying to pass it off as unbiased.
Also, those are not scare quotes. His “daughter” is a man pretending to be a woman because of mental illness and extremist ideology.
It doesn’t seem that leftist to me. Are you a shrink? Or are you using some kind of folk diagnosis to determine she’s mentally unwell?
What kind of ideology strips individuals of the right of self determination to live and be called whatever they want? That’s what most civilized people call extreme.
Can you give an example of “valid” scare quotes? Or a definition even?
That may well be. I'm also extrapolating from what I read about his upbringing. That's pretty extreme. He was severely abused by his father (possibly even sexually) and bullied by his peers. His "superpower" is an insatiable desire to proof something forever. Also asking Epstein (post-conviction) for an invitation to a wild party on his island is allowing for conclusions that are hardly flattering. And I mean that in a way that is orthogonal to happiness.
They don't really. You have to hide the meanness on occasion to get ahead, sure.
I don't like the implication that all rich people (which is Graham's criterion for success) are nice. Didn't Musk and Thiel read drafts of his later essays?
Ruthless and diplomatic (where it matters) gets you ahead. Ruthlessness is often indistinguishable from meanness.
Is lying mean? You need to lie a lot to get ahead,
> It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few.
*mean to Paul Graham. I’ve worked with a lot of mean people in important positions in my career, and they all have a kind, charismatic side when they need to. Those same people are awful to subordinates or people that can’t do something for them. Paul is high value to many people, so they treat him well.
People like Graham who aren’t often in positions where they’re taken advantage of or humbled like to pretend they and their peers are magnanimous and kind but often enough they’re just not exposed to the forces that make people ugly. All other things being equal: it’s often lack of agency over work and over their own lives—this shows up in work where people are given lots of responsibility but without the freedom to fulfill it.
I often find it concerning how elementary a lot of well off tech peoples’ theory of mind is. People are not acausal personalities, they are functions of their internals and their environments. A person mean at a stressful job might be delightful at a party after.
> I often find it concerning how elementary a lot of well off tech peoples’ theory of mind is.
This is a great way of putting it. I always get surprised when I discover that others aren't constantly modeling a theory-of-mind of other people as a part of interacting with people. That's leaving aside whether those models are accurate, people have varying degrees of skill at it, but it shocks me when I discover that some people don't do it at all, badly or otherwise.
Isn't that why a lot of us went into tech in the first place, because other people's minds are weird and confusing and they keep doing inexplicable stuff like saying things that actually mean something totally different, or not thinking about how something works when trying to use it?
Yeah, and I think that avoidance is the cardinal sin of the modern world. You can’t avoid the dissonance between how a person acts and what they say or want to be. This is especially true within yourself: you can’t ignore what James Hillman might call the “multitudes of the soul” because the pot eventually boils over, and you wonder why you cannot measure up to this ideal version of yourself.
When I’ve been mean at work, and I’ve had many moments, I’m often unsure where it comes from: why did I react that way? It’s not what I wanted. And I’ve been fortunate to be humbled so much in my life and career, now perhaps more than ever, that I’m forced to juggle with the parts of myself that I’ve left in the shadows to my own detriment. I think this is the central paradox of a lot of folks like Graham: when you have capital, even your losses can be manufactured to be wins, and so you become estranged from dissolution and decay and humbling necessary to be born again into someone with fresh perspective.
I think Jung said something like: it is better to be yourself and accept the consequences of being you versus forcing yourself into a mold of what you or others think you ought to be. And often this means engaging deeply with what you’re avoiding and coming to terms with why.
Read more, like biographies and good fiction. Meditate and see into yourself. Understanding minds is a skill like any other, and gets better with practice.
I think I'm pretty decent at understanding people these days, as in predicting how they'll react to things, figuring out what they want, that sort of thing.
But I don't understand it on a fundamental level, the way I understand something like math. I have a decent grasp of the game, but I don't understand why the rules of the game are what they are. I get the impression this is how a lot of people feel about math, or computers. They know you can compute a 20% tip by sliding the decimal point over and doubling, but it's just a procedure they follow, they don't understand it.
I've read and thought and interacted plenty. This has built up the skill just fine, but the fundamental understanding is something I don't think will ever come.
And I’m telling you that’s not a rare sentiment. I do a lot of zen, and one famous teacher talks about feeling disconnected from people for a long time. I’m not saying you have to do anything, it’s your life, but just don’t assume it’s something unique or permanent.
I don't think it's unique, but it doesn't seem to be the norm. Most people seem to just accept how people behave without thinking about it too much. When they respond to "how are you?" used as a greeting, they just do it, they're not calculating the right answer.
As far as permanence goes, I'm probably more than halfway through my lifespan at this point and there's no sign of any improvement there. Like I said, as a skill I do just fine. But that deeper understanding isn't there and I doubt it will be.
This claim seems true largely because we cherry pick examples and because this is how we feel the world ought to work. Announcing this belief is just a way of signalling prosocial stance, a nostalgic mid-10s catechism to us all just getting along.
> It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few.
Does Paul know Musk, Bezos, Trump, Thiel, etc., etc.?
It feels like this didn't age well. An optimistic product of its time. But perhaps it's a question of time horizon. Mean people eventually fail, but it's the political version of the saying, the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Or perhaps "don't be mean" primarily applies to the "little people".
This sounds like one of my former bosses' speeches! He's a nasty man, of course. He's stupid, too. Now I'm his partner. I suppose that makes me mean, too. And even more stupid. Is the detail about his wife symptomatic? My friend often says the same thing about his wife. I've tried a couple of times to tell him that it's not a good idea to 'vibe' people's intentions and that he's confusing loyalty with goodness. Like the Politburo. I'm trying to convince him that it would be more democratic and environmentally friendly to assume that everyone is mean and stupid.
> Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight.
> Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them. They can hire people who will put up with them because they need a job. But the best people have other options. A mean person can't convince the best people to work for him unless he is super convincing. And while having the best people helps any organization, it's critical for startups.
This is just lame, self-serving rationale. One of the most vapid arguments I read in recent memory.
It's the sort of rationale that results in "good people are successful, therefore successful people are good".
Winning quite often has nothing to do with being good or mean, and only with being related to the correct people and having access to more money. This, paired with the fact that most people with a lot of money are all sociopaths does not paint a very rosy "mean people fail" bullshit.
First, there's this assumption that "startups" are what really matter. Sorry, pg, I know you've made a nice career out of them, but startups aren't very significant.
Then the part you quoted assumes that "the best people" are never themselves mean. There's plenty of smart, mean people who might gravitate towards other mean people. And plenty of really good people will put up with meanness if they believe in the mission. Just read all the stories about the early days of Apple. Jobs was a terror, but his people believed they were changing the world and they accepted Jobs as a necessary part of it.
pg is basically sitting in a tiny isolated island village and saying, "Isn't it amazing how every successful person on the planet is also a devoted worshipper of the Volcano God?"
I wish this was true. Yet, I think we all have some skin in the game to why this article rings false.
When it comes to getting an advantage, people often look the other way at meanness.
For example, it’s easy to complain about how Amazon treats their employees. Yet, we choose to buy from Amazon because it’s convenient, cheap, and everyone else is doing it.
We might see an organization treat someone else unfairly but when resources are scarce, we often look the other way because it feels like there is nothing one person can do.
I like the old black and white movie, The Invisible Man, to demonstrate the situation of a specific type of meanness that seems ever present today. The enemy is invisible and is only defeated when the entire community gets involved.
I don't think Amazon treats their employees badly. Warehouse workers aren't compensated like software engineers, but what do you expect?
I'm sure there are shitty managers at Amazon (in warehouses and in software) but by and large I believe blue collar Amazon workers have it about as well as blue collar workers everywhere. Maybe better.
I don't really see the problem here.
The issue isn't about pay. It's about measuring so aggressively and turning the screws until you extract every last bit of value out of someone.
If a company is measuring the duration and frequency of bathroom breaks (to pick one of many examples that's been highlighted in the press), something has gone fundamentally wrong.
This. Humans are people, not machines. They are your neighbors. They deserve dignity. Exploiting people’s desperation for full employment is wrong.
What if I mentioned to you that a solid chunk of those employees could be given a couple of shares of stock that made a few lucky people billionaires - some that still work there - and it would be a life-changing amount of money?
In addition to some truly gnarly stories / conditions and their staunch anti-Union stance it is also a relativity issue. There is much to go around but it’s not always spread around with consideration for your employees. And there really isn’t a good reason for that in my opinion.
I hear the argument “well I guess they don’t deliver as much value / leverage for the company as others”. I get it, but at a certain point that rings as a completely hollow and greedy justification. Where that is for you is subjective. But for me? Where there are billionaires there is room for generosity.
Amazon could remove the timer on bathroom breaks to restore some of their humanity, e.g.
Low-wage workers are generally treated pretty badly. Maybe Amazon is the same as the rest, but that doesn't mean they treat their workers well.
It is very time consuming, tiring and takes effort to do principled shopping. For most people, convenience and price are more important than principles. I can’t think of many (any?) big companies that I’d be happy to give my money to, they all behave badly - only question is the degree to which each one behaves badly.
This isn’t complaining, just pointing out the reality - we actually don’t have as many options as we think we do. If one has extra money, they can spend a little more and shop at smaller but expensive places, most people are going to shop at Walmart or Amazon
> I wish this was true.
Exactly what I was thinking as I was tapping the thread link, strange to see the exact same words on the screen a second later.
Either what pg considers means is radically different from what I consider mean, or we have different things in mind when thinking about success, or he lives in a different world.
Several counter examples immediately come to mind, and not only in the startup world. Granted, it's probably easier today than in 2014 but still. It feels utterly naive. The whole piece. For instance:
> Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending.
Well, sure, if eliminating all your competitors by burning investor cash and if breaking the law left and right or disregarding ethics or the environment is considered transcending and not attacking or being mean. Now, maybe that stuff is considered fair game in pg's world.
This works great in an orderly society, where most of the really mean stuff has already been successfully disincentivized, often at great cost. Out in the jungle, it takes dozens to hundreds of years to grow a tree, but only a few minutes to cut it down.
If the successful people you meet in real life are nice and you see lots of meanness on the internet, it probably just means that anonymity causes meanness.
Or that the internet is full of mean losers. Your premise assumes anyone with an internet connection is successful and I very much doubt that assumption holds water.
Not really - I've seen some pretty mean people back in high school, because high school is one of the places where people are forced to be together, no matter what their preferences are.
But once one becomes an adult, there is a much greater leeway in choosing whom to interact with, so it is often possible to not interact with mean people at all.
Wait. There are people who aren't individually educated by private tutors while they accompany their parents on travel, and at their summer, and winter homes throughout the globe? /s
[flagged]
Everyone talking about this being out of touch with the present and how figures in proximity to Graham don’t fit the description of nice he’s referring to should think about this passage:
> For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.
> That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.
What’s changed?
Edit:
The paragraph after should be included also, I think
For a couple of decades, there were regulations that ensured market competitiveness. PG made a fortune during that time, but it's gone now.
An abundance of resources and opportunity?
Has anything changed? He's not correct about the past metric always being about zero-sum games. Railroads are pretty obviously not zero-sum, and wars are generally negative-sum. How many successful merchants existed in ancient times? I'm sure there were plenty.
And there's plenty of zero-sum in success today. Politics is the most obvious example. I can't be a Senator without excluding someone else from being a Senator. Your startup might be creating value, but the funding it needs is funding that can't go to other startups. The economy is not zero-sum because things have different value to different people, but money is zero-sum aside from banks playing tricks.
The idea is patently absurd in any case. There are plenty of successful mean people out there, including one extremely successful mean person who became particularly successful after this essay was written and is so notorious that I don't even have to name him for you to know who I'm talking about.
This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to.
I accept that the successful people pg knows are nice to him. Maybe they're even nice in general. But extrapolating that to "being mean makes you fail" is absurd.
Let’s disregard your first three paragraphs that treat his point about zero-sum games categorically. He does hedge against that interpretation in the passages I referenced.
> This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to.
Think about the names tied to Graham, the ones who appear in this very essay even. I think you’re making a gross understatement here—a slight even—of the massive influence of the likes of Dan Gackle.
Sorry, I don't really know what point you're making. I have no idea what "the massive influence of the likes of Dan Gackle" is referring to. Does he do something important besides run HN? Because running HN is important to the likes of us, but is utterly insignificant for the wider world.
You must be on to something, heh, thanks.
He’s saying growth mindsets “win” and zero-sum players, the mean ones, stagnate. This is true as a system— who wants to invest with someone intent on gouging you— and it’s true as a function of effort— if you spend your time on petty tricks and tactics, you will, in the long run, “grow” very little.
How do you explain Sam Altman's success?
I noticed that the media potrays Trump as a mean person. Help me reconcile this obseravtion with what you're saying?
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Sadly, even if accurate, the exceptions (i.e. mean people who get power) can have an outsized impact because they don't respect norms and boundaries that prevent the worst abuses.
Also some strategies I'd call "mean" can be very effective: predatory pricing, monopolization, regulatory capture, disregarding externalities, lying, fraud, etc.
Thank you. I agree. Paul's general insight is probably true on an 80/20 split, but those who are sociopathic enough can and do wield power without any care for the destruction or disruption they cause. They can even get off on it. See: Trump, Sam Altman, etc.
A velvet glove conceals the iron fist.
It may be that successful mean people just hide it well enough to seem nice and the "x-ray vision" of the author's wife doesn't work on everyone. Once a mean person's position is unassailable, the velvet gloves come off. Alternatively, money is power and power corrupts.
The current crop of billionaires are at the pinnacle of success (depending on how you define it), but most sure don't seem very nice, and that's with a large PR team working overtime to hide the meanness.
Right. Highly successful people are rarely mean in the crudest and most obvious ways, like punching somebody unprovoked. But there's nothing stopping them from being broadly callous, or screwing over people who are in no position to fight back.
At his best. (And I don't mean business or politics per se but as a philosophical take to life.)
Oh no, people are mean to me :-O. I mean, sure, we can talk about sociopaths and whatnot, who may or may not have their means, but do we need such role models? Ends, not means. Kant?
All people fail. We have examples on both sides of the spectrum. Let's not cherry pick.
I like Paul Graham a lot but this is simply not true.
Look at the most successful people of recent times and you will quickly see a consistent pattern of meanness when you dig into how they work with others: - Steve Jobs - Bill Gates - Elon Musk - Sam Altman - Etc.
But didn't all those people you list fail at the end of the day?
Bill Gates is not just unfaithful, he even considered slipping his wife STD medication to avoid having to talk about his state of affairs. He's now alone and the only people willing to care for him are probably very few old friends he didn't alienate, yet. The rest is just after his money.
Steve Jobs was an infamously bad father and husband, just as Elon Musk and they both suffered from it. Elon Musks own daughter is attacking him online. Think about that.
Elon Musk is on top of that a seriously pathetic individual. That is pretty obvious, isn't it.
Sam Altman ... I mean, just the accusations are so cringe and ignominious.
None of those people strike me as authentically happy and fulfilled. They all overstepped the mark and paid for it dearly or are in the process of doing so. They all suffered from their habits of being reckless and lacking compassion.
If failing for you means being broke or "not rich", then yes. But that would be a very narrow interpretation. Certainly not mine. I seriously pity all of them.
Steve Jobs was certainly flawed and his personal relationships extremely complicated, but I would recommend reading the memoir his daughter wrote, Small Fry as it provides a more firsthand, nuanced perspective into Jobs as a father and partner. Compared to Elon, Steve would be father of the year.
Graham's essay seems to be mostly about material success, which the listed people have in spades.
You're probably right. But then he is wrong anyway. Almost all the famous founders of the most successful companies the US produced are or have been infamously mean. Sometimes they had more likeable co-fouders like Paul Allen or Wozniak, but his little opinion piece falls flat nonetheless. He is contradicting himself in his own self-righteous thought bubble. I just chose not to participate.
It's PG, the definition of the sort of success he advocates in the startup world is "accumulated a lot of money, influence and kudos" and those guys are outlying successes in those areas, regardless of issues in their personal life and how many people detest some of them.
Sure, there are normies with greater levels of personal happiness (as well as plenty of nice normies who also managed to fall out with significant people in their lives for one reason or another), but I don't think PG is likely to consider them higher achievers, even if they're significantly more secure and happy in their career than some of those individuals.
Their companies are all doing well (although I think the jury is out on OpenAI). So did they fail? Graham seems to measure a person's success by the success of their company.
"authentically happy and fulfilled" is not the definition of success that PG is using in this essay.
TBH the pursuit of great wealth and the world of startups is not the line of work to pursue if the goal is to be "authentically happy and fulfilled".
>Elon Musks own daughter is attacking him online. Think about that.
If you read Walter Isaacson's book on Musk it's pretty clear that his kids do love him, he does care for them well, and that his "daughter" fell into pretty extremist ideology.
IMO, Isaacson isn't the most objective biographer and his sourcing tends to be pretty awful. I don't trust anything he's written about contemporary people and I'm still disappointed that the access Steve Jobs gave him was seemingly squandered.
Why the scare quotes? Would you like to be more explicit about which ideology you think she fell into, and why you consider it extremist?
edit: this book? https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/1/23895069/walter-isaacson-...
Look her up on TikTok, she’s not mentally well. Extreme leftist ideology is what I’m talking about.
You should read the book, it’s pretty good. Isaacson is not at all biased towards Musk, he has a lot of critical things to say about him. The author is one of the most trusted and thorough biographers of his generation and is known for extensive primary-source research.
This verge article is cope, they are a very politically biased organization. Linking to them is the equivalent of me linking to Fox News and trying to pass it off as unbiased.
Also, those are not scare quotes. His “daughter” is a man pretending to be a woman because of mental illness and extremist ideology.
It doesn’t seem that leftist to me. Are you a shrink? Or are you using some kind of folk diagnosis to determine she’s mentally unwell?
What kind of ideology strips individuals of the right of self determination to live and be called whatever they want? That’s what most civilized people call extreme.
Can you give an example of “valid” scare quotes? Or a definition even?
That may well be. I'm also extrapolating from what I read about his upbringing. That's pretty extreme. He was severely abused by his father (possibly even sexually) and bullied by his peers. His "superpower" is an insatiable desire to proof something forever. Also asking Epstein (post-conviction) for an invitation to a wild party on his island is allowing for conclusions that are hardly flattering. And I mean that in a way that is orthogonal to happiness.
They don't really. You have to hide the meanness on occasion to get ahead, sure.
I don't like the implication that all rich people (which is Graham's criterion for success) are nice. Didn't Musk and Thiel read drafts of his later essays?
Ruthless and diplomatic (where it matters) gets you ahead. Ruthlessness is often indistinguishable from meanness.
Is lying mean? You need to lie a lot to get ahead,
> It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few.
*mean to Paul Graham. I’ve worked with a lot of mean people in important positions in my career, and they all have a kind, charismatic side when they need to. Those same people are awful to subordinates or people that can’t do something for them. Paul is high value to many people, so they treat him well.
People like Graham who aren’t often in positions where they’re taken advantage of or humbled like to pretend they and their peers are magnanimous and kind but often enough they’re just not exposed to the forces that make people ugly. All other things being equal: it’s often lack of agency over work and over their own lives—this shows up in work where people are given lots of responsibility but without the freedom to fulfill it.
I often find it concerning how elementary a lot of well off tech peoples’ theory of mind is. People are not acausal personalities, they are functions of their internals and their environments. A person mean at a stressful job might be delightful at a party after.
> I often find it concerning how elementary a lot of well off tech peoples’ theory of mind is.
This is a great way of putting it. I always get surprised when I discover that others aren't constantly modeling a theory-of-mind of other people as a part of interacting with people. That's leaving aside whether those models are accurate, people have varying degrees of skill at it, but it shocks me when I discover that some people don't do it at all, badly or otherwise.
Isn't that why a lot of us went into tech in the first place, because other people's minds are weird and confusing and they keep doing inexplicable stuff like saying things that actually mean something totally different, or not thinking about how something works when trying to use it?
Yeah, and I think that avoidance is the cardinal sin of the modern world. You can’t avoid the dissonance between how a person acts and what they say or want to be. This is especially true within yourself: you can’t ignore what James Hillman might call the “multitudes of the soul” because the pot eventually boils over, and you wonder why you cannot measure up to this ideal version of yourself.
When I’ve been mean at work, and I’ve had many moments, I’m often unsure where it comes from: why did I react that way? It’s not what I wanted. And I’ve been fortunate to be humbled so much in my life and career, now perhaps more than ever, that I’m forced to juggle with the parts of myself that I’ve left in the shadows to my own detriment. I think this is the central paradox of a lot of folks like Graham: when you have capital, even your losses can be manufactured to be wins, and so you become estranged from dissolution and decay and humbling necessary to be born again into someone with fresh perspective.
I think Jung said something like: it is better to be yourself and accept the consequences of being you versus forcing yourself into a mold of what you or others think you ought to be. And often this means engaging deeply with what you’re avoiding and coming to terms with why.
Read more, like biographies and good fiction. Meditate and see into yourself. Understanding minds is a skill like any other, and gets better with practice.
There's understanding, and there's understanding.
I think I'm pretty decent at understanding people these days, as in predicting how they'll react to things, figuring out what they want, that sort of thing.
But I don't understand it on a fundamental level, the way I understand something like math. I have a decent grasp of the game, but I don't understand why the rules of the game are what they are. I get the impression this is how a lot of people feel about math, or computers. They know you can compute a 20% tip by sliding the decimal point over and doubling, but it's just a procedure they follow, they don't understand it.
I've read and thought and interacted plenty. This has built up the skill just fine, but the fundamental understanding is something I don't think will ever come.
And I’m telling you that’s not a rare sentiment. I do a lot of zen, and one famous teacher talks about feeling disconnected from people for a long time. I’m not saying you have to do anything, it’s your life, but just don’t assume it’s something unique or permanent.
I don't think it's unique, but it doesn't seem to be the norm. Most people seem to just accept how people behave without thinking about it too much. When they respond to "how are you?" used as a greeting, they just do it, they're not calculating the right answer.
As far as permanence goes, I'm probably more than halfway through my lifespan at this point and there's no sign of any improvement there. Like I said, as a skill I do just fine. But that deeper understanding isn't there and I doubt it will be.
So when will Trump fail?
This claim seems true largely because we cherry pick examples and because this is how we feel the world ought to work. Announcing this belief is just a way of signalling prosocial stance, a nostalgic mid-10s catechism to us all just getting along.
Its the 2020s and mean is doing numbers.
Just wait. Mean reverts to the mean.
A sufficiently long diversion from the mean is indistinguishable from cultural norm. Ask Putin
> It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few.
Does Paul know Musk, Bezos, Trump, Thiel, etc., etc.?
It feels like this didn't age well. An optimistic product of its time. But perhaps it's a question of time horizon. Mean people eventually fail, but it's the political version of the saying, the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Or perhaps "don't be mean" primarily applies to the "little people".
This sounds like one of my former bosses' speeches! He's a nasty man, of course. He's stupid, too. Now I'm his partner. I suppose that makes me mean, too. And even more stupid. Is the detail about his wife symptomatic? My friend often says the same thing about his wife. I've tried a couple of times to tell him that it's not a good idea to 'vibe' people's intentions and that he's confusing loyalty with goodness. Like the Politburo. I'm trying to convince him that it would be more democratic and environmentally friendly to assume that everyone is mean and stupid.
> Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight.
> Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them. They can hire people who will put up with them because they need a job. But the best people have other options. A mean person can't convince the best people to work for him unless he is super convincing. And while having the best people helps any organization, it's critical for startups.
This is just lame, self-serving rationale. One of the most vapid arguments I read in recent memory.
It's the sort of rationale that results in "good people are successful, therefore successful people are good".
Winning quite often has nothing to do with being good or mean, and only with being related to the correct people and having access to more money. This, paired with the fact that most people with a lot of money are all sociopaths does not paint a very rosy "mean people fail" bullshit.
It's tremendously naive.
First, there's this assumption that "startups" are what really matter. Sorry, pg, I know you've made a nice career out of them, but startups aren't very significant.
Then the part you quoted assumes that "the best people" are never themselves mean. There's plenty of smart, mean people who might gravitate towards other mean people. And plenty of really good people will put up with meanness if they believe in the mission. Just read all the stories about the early days of Apple. Jobs was a terror, but his people believed they were changing the world and they accepted Jobs as a necessary part of it.
pg is basically sitting in a tiny isolated island village and saying, "Isn't it amazing how every successful person on the planet is also a devoted worshipper of the Volcano God?"
Yet sociopaths are successful and run this industry.
Yeah imagine a nice Steve Jobs would Apple be the same
There would be one more free handicapped space in the parking lot.
Funny where I work there's a C8 parked in a handicapped spot
They are good at simulating kindness
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