#also like. its gotten better recently but god the fatigue is no joke like i didnt realize just how close to bedridden i was

[maretriarch]

my issue is i spread myself too thin i get a lot of fun highly ambitious ideas that I start in very short succession and get them done about halfway until the short time reward joy runs out and then end up with a pile of projects like this

[topicprinter]

Michael Seibel, president of the Y Combinator (YC), recently published an essay on the type of person startups make sense for. The original article is here: https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-should-i-start-a-startup/For context: YC is a prolific investment firm for very young startups. Reddit was accepted into the first batch of YC companies. Seibel is a successful entrepreneur now turned investor. From his experience and job role, he has many data points on aspirational entrepreneurs who make it, those who don’t, and most importantly, who those people were before we knew how they’d turn out.Language and ideas were the original “scaling platform”/software/meme, so it makes sense that YC would be interested in facilitating these platforms. Consequently, they also run a popular discussion forum (“Hacker News”) for people interested in startups and technology, colloquially referred to as “hackers”. Seibel’s essay was submitted to the forum for discussion and discussed heavily here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14806393. With ~280 comments and 500 upvotes in two days, it’s reasonable to say the post has struck a nerve.I’ll save you the effort of trawling through the comments (that’s my job), but the most frequent reactions fall along these lines:Loved it: Super motivating, I relate, let’s talk shop, tactics, mentors, tools, etc.Hated it: This article encourages hubris about one’s ability, most startups fail and need luck. Also, privilege, lots of money, lack of wife, kids, family, mortgage, yada yada.The ontologists: people who concerned with being. This is where the gold is.To clarify, most people genuinely shouldn’t try to start a startup. Preaching that kind of tactic based panacea is just as helpful as telling everyone to be “happy”.What’s useful about startups, however, is that they’re rigorously executed petri dishes of life experiments. Startups are defined by growth, whether its users, time spent on the platform, revenue, profit, etc. For our personal case study, if we substitute growth for the more neutral term “change”, startups become fantastic case studies to a certain type of existence, specifically, a dynamic one.Back to ontology. There is a key moment that got pushed to the bottom where Michael tries to respond to Q&A’s, and he has this insightful interaction:A: What's the origin of your desire to be better than all of your peers?MW: Because I realized that I could be betterB: In what ways? Sorry Michael, but I reject the idea that you can be 'better' than another person.MW: I should have said I realized I could be better at the game of high school student looking to get into a good college.Commenter B was looking for evidence that people in startups think they’re better than us plebeians. But give yourself a gut check of Seibel’s life and you can probably conclude this is unlikely. How’s that joke go again? Oh right.“Would you rather be a white woman or black male?”Though tech has gotten better and will continue to do so (proof: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/16/stop-blaming-the-tech-industry-for-the-worlds-problems/), the reality is positions of power for men of color remain statistically abnormalities. On a good day, Seibel may have looked at his life and job and felt like the Obama of Silicon Valley. And for all the others, Chris Washington. Heck, that scene from Get Out might have been inspired by a hypothetical party I just made up where Billy Dee Williams/Lando Calrissian and Seibel bump into each other, and the two men give each other a wink and nod of camaraderie. “I see you brother, keep making cash.”Which is to say, it is unlikely for Seibel to have grown up internalizing that he was better than others. Read his original piece and this alternate hypothesis checks out. Now that we’ve set aside that interpretation, it begs the question: what did he mean to really mean?“I realized I could be better” reads very different if we read it as “I realized I could become Better.”Later on, when another commenter asks why the 3 constraints (1. underdog preference, 2. loves the thrill of poor odds, 3. Amor fati) that Seibel said were the preferred constraints of startup founders, he claimed no answer. After all, even Seibel won’t purport to have God-given Moses style tablets on the commandments of constraints that founders must have.With help from Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s “Antifragile”, we can conclude that all three constraints are great heuristics of the type of shock that biological systems benefit from. Cue the tape:“The bold conjecture made here is that everything that has life in it is to some extent antifragile (but not the reverse). It looks like the secret of life is antifragility. Typically, the natural—the biological—is both antifragile and fragile, depending on the source (and the range) of variation. A human body can benefit from the name Wolff’s Law after an 1892 article by a German surgeon. But a dish, a car, an inanimate object will not—these may be robust but cannot be intrinsically antifragile. Inanimate—that is, nonliving—material, typically, when subjected to stress, either undergoes material fatigue or breaks.We can use the distinction as a marker between living and nonliving. The fact that the artificial needs to be antifragile for us to be able to use it as tissue is quite a telling difference between the biological and the synthetic. Your house, your food processor, and your computer desk eventually wear down and don’t self-repair. They may look better with age (when artisanal), just as your jeans will look more fashionable with use, but eventually time will catch up with them and the hardest material will end up looking like Roman ruins. Your jeans may look improved and more fashionable when worn out, but their material did not get stronger, nor do they self-repair.”Seibel can’t write too philosophically, or he comes off as a mystical Internet cult writer. Once again, that’s my job. So let’s put it together.There is good evidence (Seibel’s data points as President of YC) to believe that, for a certain group of people, subjecting themselves to stress (in the form of unfavorable odds) is a desirable end goal. Further, we know that the indicator of living, organic systems is their system’s ability to grow from the right type of stressors: sprints in working out, not marathons; keeping a low personal cost of living so you can risk taking an unpaid internship at your dream company; etc. So what do this all mean?For people who are more Life than Death, starting a startup is a fantastic way of becoming who you deeply want to be. Be it warrior, saint or thinker, many of the commenters never realized that Seibel was writing an article about character formation. In fact, he explicitly refutes financial success as the basis of why he recommends starting a startup. But because of his need for propriety due to his status, he can’t outright and say “adversity will give you the opportunity become exactly the type of person you respect, leading you to respect yourself more and be more satisfied. This is guaranteed regardless of the financial outcome.”Why can’t he say this? Because there’s a non-trivial percentage of the population that is OK with “death”, living instead of Life. Fear sells much better than hope. And in their defense, even Taleb writes about this. Remember, most startup founders will financially fail, but the backroom secret is that most news fail to report the astonishingly high satisfaction rate (https://unsupervisedmethods.com/the-startup-failure-myth-b80fc4b6af45), even among “failed” entreprneurs, as opposed to the normal population’s job satisfaction (http://www.gallup.com/poll/188144/employee-engagement-stagnant-2015.aspx) The antifragility of the system requires individuals to be fragile. Barbells leverage means you need to have people manning libraries, fire stations and police departments vs. jetting off to Hawaii and crowdfunding video game playthroughs. If you’re willing to live like a pauper to do what you love, your self-satisfaction will be its own reward.The key is to choose with eyes wide open. Well, maybe a wink is fine ;)