All it takes is for one to work out
(alearningaday.blog)806 points by herbertl 4 days ago
806 points by herbertl 4 days ago
I think none of those blanket statements here work.
Really it's just odds of finding success vs effort / time spent. And whether that's worth it.
Any of the blanket statements could be true depending on what the exact odds are.
There could be near 0% chance of finding success and it would be better idea to rethink and spend time elsewhere, or yes, there's 10% chance of finding success and it's significant enough that trying 20 times is enough.
If we are talking about e.g. finding a house, if you are not finding any it could very well be that your expectations vs budget is unlikely to find anything and you have to reconsider strategy.
Someone could be repeatedly trying to find work, and thinking it's just a matter of time, but really time would be better spent on improving their strategy, resume, or other means.
These statements to me seem like motivational non-sense which misrepresent how real world works or what the patterns really are like. At best they just give someone a false understanding of how the world works, at worst they make someone spend all their time in the wrong direction.
The difference is that if I apply for 10 jobs at once or put a bid in for 10 houses hoping one will succeed, I’ve lost nothing for trying 10 times.
If I gamble and try 10 times and win once - I have probably lost money.
Even if I interview 10 times and fail 9, I’ve learned something from each interview and I’ve gotten better. That’s also not true from rolling dice.
You lost something when every other person started doing the same thing. Now you have to write or review ten applications instead of one. Now you're going to get paid less because it cost $20k to hire you instead of $2k. Now your company is going to be filled with like-minded people, "hustlers", who do not know how to improve things themselves, just spray and pray until someone mistakenly rewards them.
When the outcome is positive, I see nothing wrong. Especially if you lose basically nothing in trying.
Your time, energy, etc are not nothing. If you think like that, you have already lost and are not making optimal decisions.
The way I read this is that there are many "games" in life (applying for schools, jobs, dating, etc) where the odds of "winning" each instance are not in your favor, but you only need to win once to win overall. If you treat every absence of a positive outcome as a failure, then you're inevitably going to lose hope and give up.
This is in contrast to gambling where you actually do need to win more often than not to win overall.
Interestingly I found my first job through a video game and I never went to uni. I got good at the game (to brag, top 0.1%) and met people in the game who referred me because of the "respect" from being good at that particular game got me. Might seem odd, but a lot of people in the industry played this game and ability to be good at the game did signal something.
I have never spam applied anywhere, and have hyperfocused on very specific positions, putting a lot of prep effort into what I have considered strong matches.
Indeed. "Just one more roll of the dice and I'll be ahead."
Worse, this guy isn't trying to get a job. He's just trying to get into grad school. Which is no longer a guarantee of a good career, but may be a guarantee of a big debt. Remember that "I did everything right" post on HN a few weeks ago? CS degree from a good school, but nobody wants junior CS people any more.
Taking a break from studying for my interview in two days at a FANG company, I checked Hacker News and this article was at the top. I've been studying for this interview harder than any of the others in the past. I feel well-prepared, but there's always the luck factor. I hope this is a sign that this interview will be the one to work out!
Wow, I really dislike this framing of life as a lottery. Yes, people can get lucky. You could win the lottery. Statistically, someone else will hold the winning ticket, every time. It's even worse, because graduate school admissions and startup success are correlated between attempts. If you bring a shotgun but you're not even aiming at the target, you're never going to hit it.
This is a great approach! After every opportunity that closed on me another arose, and it always was the better one.
Through these experiences I totally agree, and try to apply it to life, but it's hard, even knowing that it's true. How cool is it for every college, person, job offer, scholarship to want you?
Even though we're looking just for "the one" it's very hard for me to mitigate the feeling of getting rejected, even knowing it was not "the one". Rejection generally hurts, when you care about the goal
Exactly correct. As a YouTuber, all it takes is one YouTube Short to go viral for me, and I'll have hundreds of thousands of subscribers overnight. I haven't had anything go seriously viral, but my biggest Shorts have resulted in huge subscriber jumps. The best advice I ever received was to consistently post for years on end. If you have high-quality content, one of those Shorts is almost certain to eventually hit the big leagues.
When it does, your life will change in an instant.
I thought HN is supposed to upvote articles that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Does this article gratify intellectual curiosity? I don't understand why these shallow feel-good articles devoid of any intellectual curiosity always get upvoted to the top! There are so many high effort, substantive articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest that nobody upvotes!
because even when it isn't why people come here, and if there was too much of it you may be right - a message which brings up a smile or warm feeling is enough for people to be thankfull
and that is a good thing
Obviously the article is voted to the top. So the the lurkers at /newest and the general HN audience must like this. Still I wish though that upvoters stuck to the HN guidelines of upvoting stuff that really gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, not just some feel-good piece. There is no shortage of other places where I can find feel-good articles. I want HN to stick to HN guidelines.
This is all the more sad for me because among all the spam, many high effort articles get posted to /newest but many don't get the upvotes. These shallow, feel-good articles always get the upvotes. I guess it takes more time to read and appreciate a high effort article. So I understand why this happens. But ...
I submit articles personally that I think will start interesting conversations. I didn’t submit this one. But I suspected it would go in the direction of trying to start a company - which it did. That is entirely on brand for a site run by a VC company.
Mission accomplished.
How many great opportunities are passed up by people waiting for the 'perfect' one to come along?
Job offers passed on because it wasn't the perfect fit. Marriage chances missed because the perfect soul mate must still be around the corner. Good schools rejected because it wasn't their dream school.
Luck often accompanies those willing to accept less than perfect in many cases.
On a much less optimistic dark humor note, this is the same argument in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies about a superintelligent AI emerging and being a threat to humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...
I’ve considered some form of grad school a few times, but I always came to the conclusion there just wasn’t enough value in it for a software engineer like me. I don’t plan on teaching, and I’m not really interested in the “science” of computer science so much as the practice of it. Anyone able to validate or challenge my assumptions here?
If you don't want to do any of the science part of computer science then this route may not be one for you to consider. However, if we assume that AI is going to be with us in 5 years, and that it would take you 5 years to get a PhD in an AI-related area you do find interesting, and furthermore that demand for talent with a PhD in that area has gone up, or stayed constant vs demand for general software development talent, then, based on that pile of "if"s, while a $100 million job offer from Meta may not exist in 5 years, it is still something to consider.
The only thing to add here is the value of the network you will build. It’s very easy for swes to forget that people connecting to people is how things happen. Just be careful around cost. Speaking from experience, having student loan debt changes the range of your vision.
Sort of related - 10k pushups and other silly exercise quests that changed my life: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456188
While it’s true that all we need is one to work out, in general we strive to be in positions where we have multiple options, not just hinging everything on one passing chance. Life is less stressful that way, and that’s why people today feel like they are under so much pressure and have little choice over how their lives unfold.
Reminds me of AlphaGo
It didn't try to maximise by how much it won, but just that it won. Apparently it changed the meta for human pkayers.
If you have the time for it, the movie/doc is worth watching https://youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y
Purely poetic advice. If the local economy collapses, you will very much want to move. There's still a 50% chance the first spouse doesn't hold up until death. There are many schools that give out degrees that aren't worth a wooden frame in today's job market.
Needed to read this. 20 years building software for other people, finally launched my own thing a few weeks ago. Most days feel like nothing is working. But you only need one thing to click.
Personally, I do believe and still on the perpetual aim for that “You have to be right just once.” For me, it is not about the “right one(s).” My philosophy is that I should be able to “Walk Out” from situations, deals, and options that I picked and be ready for the next.
I wrote about Walking Out,[1] but more from a content/digital life perspective. I do follow similar thinking with life situations too.
I’m neither complaining nor comparing, but hey, life dealt a bad enough hand early on. Mother left us when the last of our siblings (sister) was barely 6 months old, and father was never present. My brothers and I survived by working odd jobs, stealing vegetables from neighbors, and running errands for almost everyone in the neighborhood. My brother worked repairing bicycles, cleaning trucks, and giving up studies so I could study. I started teaching the neighbors’ kids in my 5th grade and paid through school, then worked computer stuff to pay for college, and also begged a lot of relatives to supplement for food, books, etc. I know what actual starvation meant. It was only around my 15th year I learnt that winters can actually be warm when I had a sleep-over at my friend’s place where they had warm blankets that was thick enough.
So, my belief is that things won’t work out. Can I Walk Out? Well, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
Way later in life, I realized the neighbors knew about our night crawls. That was why they started giving us their vegetable garden harvest, and the “we have some extra cooking oil.”
> You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.
You mean, the first one to say yes. Tbh seems more like first to say yes, not first to be fit and say yes.
> You don’t need every house to accept your offer. You just need the one that feels like home.
Same here. Is easy to find one to say yes. Hard to be “feels like home” && say yes.
> You don’t need every person to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.
“The one” is hard.
>You don’t need ten universities to say yes. You just need the one that opens the right door.
Same. What even means “the right door”? How can you even know before you got in?
I think it’s a bad analogy. At least frame it a more realistic: your only need one job to say yes. Might not be the right job but it’s a job. Same for all other.
It also takes just one big mistake to really make things tougher…
Was living in a small city for a while during the pandemic. Commented to parent that dating scene wasn’t going to be good and I needed to move to a bigger city. They answered “all you need is to meet one person”.
I did. Met on an app, turned out they lived round the corner from me, we are now married. She is a _very_ unusual person (has to be to work with me) and you wouldn’t expect her to be in a small city, but due to particular life circumstances she had just moved there temporarily.
A (possible) restatement of the oft quoted "They have to be lucky all the time, we only have to be lucky once" (albeit only the second half)
At some point you don't need "the one that gives you joy". You need the one that pays the bills and feeds the family
The problem is that the opportunity you need might be a 1 in 100 lifetimes opportunity...
These days once in a lifetime opportunities are getting increasingly rare... This is something that the lucky few do not understand because they may pass up on once-in-100-lifetimes opportunities just about every single day. The asymmetry of opportunities is massive.
Our system is not a level playing field.
No system in the history of humanity has wasted as much human potential as our current system. Opportunities are completely monopolized.
Yep, heard so many no’s while building my startup. They mean nothing to me now because I got a few yes’s when it mattered.
When I saw the title, I thought it was going to be about exercise :-P
I'm confused. This just seems like feel-good bullshit advice that only works for people in extremely good circumstances.
There's a false equivalence between -
“All it takes is for one to work out.”
and the following:
- "You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit."
- "You don’t need every house to accept your offer. You just need the one that feels like home. "
The latter assumes that _every_ attempt you make has a chance at being "the right fit", "the one that feels like home". That is not the way things works for 99% of us.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this wasn’t about exercising.
I think it would be better if it were about exercising; it's more useful advise that way.
So, all it takes is for you to work out: You may not get into that grad school / that job, but you'll be healthier and you'll feel less depressed. In fact, even if you're in grad school, it's pretty good advice for coping avoiding burnout, coping with impostor syndrome etc.
Maybe you need only one. I need universal adoration! Everyone must love me!
I thought it was about exercising. (which also helps with stress)
I miss the days of legit journalism where we had these people called "editors" which catch these types of issues before publication
Fuck yeah, man. That's great. Thank you for saying that
Needed this today. Apparently the HN hive mind agreed.
All it takes, is for one to work out.
That may be true, but it's also a trap: You can say exactly the same thing to someone at a casino with their last £50 at five in the morning. Sometimes, the advice that people give you, if they care about you, is that the smart thing to do is to walk away from a rough game - and if you don't, the end can be very bad indeed. You are a variable over the search space, and the way that you interact with it alters the results that you will get as applied to your life:
Making this specific, I used to work in employment advice. As one of the things here is a job search, I'll touch on that one: There are people who have been applying for jobs for decades. I've met many people who haven't been able to get a job in north of twenty years. It's obvious that what they're doing will never work out for them. There may be one job in the world out there that will take them, but just doing a naive search will - in all probability - never locate for them that job. The world is too large and they don't have the time to search even a single percentage of it. What they need to do is to look at all the reasons they're not getting a job and prioritise addressing those:
- Do they have all the qualifications and certificates they need for their target industry? - Do they have recent relevant experience? - Do they have a good CV? - Do they have a decent cover letter? - Do they have a good interview?
Now, that's not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.
The other way in which it's a bad piece of advice is that people aren't machines. When you've spent a great deal of time gambling and losing then the tendency is for people to seek bigger payoffs at higher comparative risks and/or lower comparative chances of success. The tendency is for people to be less likely to do the things, e.g. volunteering, that will improve their odds as their tally of losses increases.
Down thread, raw_anon_1111 posits the position that you've lost nothing by trying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46091837 - in my experience this is not the case.
People lose time in making the attempts, they lose energy (which is perhaps more important than time,) and they lose sight of other options - which game they're playing, why they're playing it, how they're playing it. It will, in all probability, not work out within their lifetimes - and the reason that it won't work out is that following this sort of strategy has made them the sort of person for whom it is unlikely to do so. Whilst their friends went and volunteered, and took concrete steps, they just kept trying that same strategy on the assumption that at least one was out there for them that met their requirements. And there just wasn't. Not in that timespan.
Now, I'm not saying just give up and never try. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. But if you've been trying to make something work out - as a rule of thumb - for six months say, and you're not seeing concrete steps towards success - you should re-examine your fundamental assumptions. Preferably, if it's something high-stakes, with the assistance of a competent third party that you trust. Because maybe you're the problem, and maybe there's something you can do about it. And you'd best find that out now rather than spending 20 years on some warmly meant advice that perhaps isn't going to work out for you.
I have been calling out specifically the difference between things you can try in parallel with little to know negative consequences - like applying for multiple jobs, going on multiple interviews, putting bids in for multiple houses - and winning one, and things that you have to do sequentially that cost time - like starting a business and failing multiple times that take 3-5 years each, cost real money and there are opportunity cost.
In the short run, I'd mostly agree with you. Something being parallelisable at a low cost lets you do more of it in a short space of time, and probably lends itself to what should be an earlier decision as to whether to reexamine your approach. You're going to have a lot more information earlier - all else being equal.
In the mid to long run, however, the costs mount up - however small they may start off as. You can make, say, 20 job applications a day - (not an uncommon thing to have people do if they were on mandated provision) - have a couple of hundred open in a few weeks and get nothing back. That takes something out of people. People will still spend time from finding and making those applications, energy, motivation, an awareness of the wider context in which their problem's structured....
There's a human component to the problem which generates opportunity costs for things that don't seem to have any. Like yes, technically, you can put 20 job applications in a day and then go and volunteer. But it's the rare person who's actually going to have the energy, motivation and awareness to do that when they're going hard on a broad search strategy.
From an investor perspective yeah if you put $200k into a 20 different business, 19 can fail but that one that gives you back 50x your investment is a massive payoff.
Of course this is of little solace to the 19 other "entrepeneurs" you funded, who wind up with zero for busting their butt for the gamble
That’s an aggressive problematic gambler mentality.