[Quoted] Your high IQ will kill your startup

This is an article which I find really interesting, the original URL is here. I shamelessly copy-and-paste it here so that I have a copy in case that site is down. All the credit goes to the original author.

In 2004 I was in Brazil, walking down the hill in Lapa to get some lunch. I was with a friend who I had met in the hostel I was staying - his name was Ofer. We were having a meta discussion about intelligence, and what role it plays in success.

Then out of the side of the road stepped a man. He was holding a knife in one hand and a bottle in the other hand. He spoke to us in fast portugese, clearly asking us to hand over the things we held. I stood there, not very sure what to do. Ofer started speaking quickly to the man, telling the man not to rob us.

What you have to know about Ofer is that he had been an Israeli soldier. He hated violence of any form, but he knew how to be violent.

The man threw the bottle on the floor and it broke into pieces, he picked up the bottle and lunged at us. I ran off, and Ofer stood there and dodged the man, all the while talking to him. The man attacked several times, and each time Ofer just moved aside.

Then finally, Ofer kicked the weapons out of the guys hands, punched him, and he fell. He then told me to run, and we ran down the hill to the restaurant.

We sat there and he continued what we had spoken about. He said: That demonstrates what I mean. The man with the knife did not know how to use that knife. If he had been as trained in knife fighting as I was in hand combat, he would have been able to destroy me. But he had a tool that he felt gave him an advantage, but it's nothing compared to a person who has no tool, but has worked to develop what he has.

Intelligence is like a knife. If you are intelligent, you are at a clear advantage against people who are not intelligent. But if you are intelligent, and another person is not as intelligent, but the other person is willing to train harder than you, the other person will very quickly overtake you in ability.

How your intelligence will destroy you
People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. They don't have to work hard to get good grades, they never really have to do much to get ahead. The major challenge of early life is school - and school is designed for average people. So intelligent people just breeze through.

But there is a point where every intelligent person faces something that requires more than intelligence. It requires hard work, it requires the ability to fail, it requires being able to do tough tasks, boring tasks. For the first time in their life, in spite of their intelligence, these intelligent people are challenged, and they start failing. Like when they first attempt to create a startup.

And that's where most of them retreat. They focus on things they can't fail on, and ignore the other important things. They start to blame other things (like the school system). They procrastinate. They refuse to face new problems because they know they will not be able to handle them, and this does not fit into their worldview that they are invincible.

Let me tell another story. In 2007, I had dinner with the father of my girlfriend in Paris. He is currently a vice president at one of the top 5 consulting companies in the world. He is a jewish french immigrant from Morroco - he came in the 70s to France with no money and no connections, and he made it up to become Vice President, even though he studied to be an engineer.

I asked him: How did you do it? How did you start from being an immigrant to become executive material? He told me: I got this far because I'm intelligent. He continued: But there were many many people as intelligent as I am who graduated together with me. They are still engineers right now. The difference between me and them is that when I arrived, I knew that I did not have family here in france, I did not have connections. And I knew there were a lot of other people as intelligent as I was, and who had all these advantages. 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.

How this relates to you
Being intelligent is like having a knife. If you train every day in using the knife, you will be invincible. If you think that just having a knife will make you win any battle you fight, then you will fail. This believe in your own inherent ability is what will kill your startup. Success comes from the work and ability you put in becoming better than the others, and not from some brilliance you feel you may have within you.

So don't believe that the brilliance of your idea is what will make you successful. What will make you successful is when you are out there every day, doing something new, challenging yourself, trying new methods, studying new ways, having a lot of small failures, then getting better every day.

Ten Meaningful Quotes

These quotes are from the net, and I don't know who the original author is. The translations are to my best effort, certainly there could be better ones and you are welcome to help out. :)

第一句话：如果我们之间有1000步的距离，你只要跨出第1步，我就会朝你的方向走其余的999步。
[First Quote]: If there are 1000 steps between us, as long as you take the first one, I am willing to walk the remaining steps towards you.

第二句话：通常愿意留下来跟你争吵的人，才是真正爱你的人。

[Second Quote]: Usually the one who stays back to argue with you is the one who truly loves you.

第三句话：付出真心，才会得到真心，却也可能伤得彻底；保持距离，就能保护自己，却也注定永远寂寞。

[Third Quote]: Give out your heart, only then you will get one from others, but you could hurt thoroughly in the process; keeping a distance with others can protect yourself, but it also means you are destined to eternal solitude.

第四句话:有时候，不是对方不在乎你，而是你把对方看得太重。

[Fourth Quote]: Sometimes it is not the other person doesn't care about you, it is you who put too much attention on that person.

第五句话：朋友就是把你看透了还能喜欢你的人。

[Fifth Quote]: A friend is someone who knows you thoroughly but still chooses to like you.

第六句话：就算是believe，中间也藏了一个lie。

[Sixth Quote]: Even the word 'believe' has an 'lie' embedded within

第七句话：真正的好朋友，并不是在一起就有聊不完的话题，而是在一起，就算不说话也不会感到尴尬。

[Seventh Quote]: Real good friends don't have to have infinite amount of topics to talk about; but instead, when they are together, they won't feel awkward for not talking.

第八句话：没有一百分的另一半，只有五十分的两个人。

[Eighth Quote]: There is no 100% perfect partner, only two 50% persons

第九句话：为你的难过而快乐的，不是善人；为你的快乐而快乐的，是朋友；为你的难过而难过的，就是那些该放进心里的人。

[Ninth Quote]: Those who feel happy over your sorrow are not kind souls; those who are happy over your happiness are your friends; those who feel your sadness are those whom you should put inside your heart

第十句话：冷漠，有时候并不是无情，只是一种避免被伤害的工具。

[Tenth Quote]: Indifference, sometimes doesn't mean lack of emotions, it just serves as a tool to avoid injury.

这十句话很有意思，也很有深度，值得认真去思考，也许会有意想不到的收获。但请记住：没有绝对正确的话，不要过于迷信某一两句话，要结合具体情况进行具体的分析，没有自已的思考与判断，好话也会害死人。

These ten quotes have quite profound meanings and deserve some extra thoughts. But please note: There is no absolute truth, use your own discretion on these advices.

Weird Quote

While reading this article on the new OpenSolaris 08.11, I came across the following quote:

The OpenSolaris project launched its first pseudo-commercial release, code-named Project Indiana, in May, with the goal of getting the open source variant of Solaris humming along in binary form and being used by the development community and other cheapskates who like to play with operating systems but who don't want to pay for them.

What caught my attention is the author labels those who tinker with open-source, free software as cheapskates who don't want to pay. Hey come on, if Windows were open-source, i promise I will install Windows everywhere, including the flush system of my loo.

Nice Quote

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

The above is not as simple as it seems: it implies when programmers try to program more and more complex constructs, their programs will look more and more like Lisp.

In some sense I agree.

Demise of Lisp in JPL

An interesting article on demise of Lisp in JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) to give way to more 'hip' programming languages like C++ and Java:

http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html


If you ever spent any respectable days in the tech industry, you will see the industry is usually not controlled and managed by the ablest and most competent people. In fact, most people (especially managers and up) are:

• Clueless about the technology
• Always assuming the hottest technologies are the best, regardless of the skillsets of the engineers and the applicability of the problems at hand
  

Amusing Quotes

Start to collect some interesting quotes whenever I see them:

• A 'committee' may not be a very positive term to some people, as implicitly pointed out by the following note:
  
  "Common Lisp was designed by a committee (but a pretty smart one) to combine, rationalize, and standardize a number of high-powered, annoyingly incompatible dialects of Lisp." - CS325 course note of Northwestern U