On Life as Art, Poetic Truths & Getting Rich

For me, the process of getting and being rich is simultaneously an aspiration, an outcome and a clear measuring stick of 'success.'

Ah, but isn't success a state of mind, defined by the quality of one's living, the values that one holds and the bedrock of family and friends?

Absolutely, but life is defined by paradoxes and how we reconcile them.  After all, many a brilliant artist starves to death or goes bonkers, overcome by the sheer weight of market failure combined with the psychological isolation and loneliness that comes from failing to realize one's goals.

More to the point, we are not brains in a jar.  We are flesh and blood, and for the limited time that we all have on the planet, few of us aspire to live monk-like existences devoid of material wants. 

Moreover, the field of play that we compete within keeps score in a monetary and asset oriented fashion.

It reminds me of a riddle that we put forth to interviewees in my companies:

You can choose between working with two companies.  At one company, you will get to build the product of your dreams, free of time, market and dollar constraints.  The only catch is that the product will only be used by very few people, and under no definition will it be a market success.  At the other company, you will face all sorts of trade-offs and compromises based on time, dollars, customer requirements, competitive, etc., BUT the product will be used by countless millions of people and be a huge market and financial success.  Which company do you choose?

Of course, few choices are so binary, but the way interviewees answer the question speaks volumes about how they define success, how cognizant they are of team goals, their embrace of the goodness of caring about paying customers and the like, and implicitly speaks to a recognition/maturity that the art versus commerce paradox is not an all or none assessment.

With this as the backdrop, I want to STRONGLY encourage readers that aspire to get rich to read the book 'How to Get Rich.' 

Written by Felix Dennis, chairman of Maxim Magazine (so a bonafide $400M net worth type of rich guy), the book offers sage, simple, clear and actionable truths about the earnest pursuit of getting rich.

It's a quick read with straight-up delivery, including decisions made, outcomes realized and lessons learned.  It's also a joy to read.  And as a wordsmither and lover of good prose, I also appreciate the fact that Dennis approaches his tome with the eyes (and ears) of a poet.

What follows is the opening poem from the book (by the author), a poem that also frames chapter by chapter the topics that the book covers.  Any entrepreneur would be hard pressed to more crisply articulate the path to success:

How to Get Rich (by Felix Dennis)

Good Fortune? The fact is
The more you practice,
The harder you sweat,
The luckier you get.

Ideas? We've had 'em
Since Eve deceived Adam,
But take it from me
Execution's the key.

The money? Just pester
A likely investor.
To get what you need
You toady to greed.

The talent? Go sign it.
But first wine and dine it.
It's tedious work
With a talented jerk.

Good timing? To win it
You gotta be in it.
Just never be late
To quit or cut bait.

Expansion? It's vanity!
Profit is sanity.
Overhead begs
To walk on two legs.

The first step? Just do it
And bluff your way through it.
Remember to duck!
God speed ….

And Good Luck!

Related Links:

1. The Tyranny of the ALL or NONE: embracing the paradox of the AND in life.
2. All In: on getting rich.
3. Brain in the Jar: on maximizing your time on the planet in terms of productivity.

Comments

[John "Z-Bo" Zabroski]

Regarding the interview question...

The real world isn't so cut and dry, and I'm not interested in the motivation behind your actions so much as your ability to see the consequences of your actions.

I want to know WHY you are catering to a smaller market. WHO is requesting these features? Is it because 5% of the customers are really loud, and 95% of the customers are really quiet? Give me a customer I can identify with, and convince me that customer is representative of where you will get your profit margins from.

The people who provide the best customer service are the people who can best identify with the customer.

Otherwise, I'd say your question is testing pretty much nothing but someone's ability to B.S. and the results you are seeing are a placebo effect.

[John "Z-Bo" Zabroski]

By the way... just to hammer home the point with a book you and I have both read... "Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg. Now, there is a book about a software project with an unlimited budget that failed. However, why did it fail? Should the developers feel proud, simply because they've been told it was a "dream" project? That's what is so horrifyingly awesome about the book... it captures a train wreck in motion, step-by-step.

The problem with Mitch Kapor's dream project Chandler was nobody ever actually defined what "revolutionary" actually meant. It was supposed to revolutionize the way people organized and accessed information relevant to their daily life. Yet, when it came down to it, the developers would have long debates over how to execute "revolutionary". Nobody sat down and coded it.

[Mark Sigal]

Hey John,

My experience is that very few technical types have a deep understanding of margins and markets, and while such knowledge is hugely welcome, setting that as the bar would filter out ALOT of great programmers.

Hence, I want people who aspire to things like customer adoption, engagement and heavy usage over artistic perfection and self indulgence.

To your point, nothing is ever so cut and dry, but the goal of such tests are to get a binary enough of a read to decide whether a given hire will age well in battle, and will have the right type of instincts necessary for growth and survival, as assumptions often prove terribly wrong in startups, especially early stage ones, and those early adjustments are often the forking points between life and death.

On some level, sales and marketing types are an open book. They have either driven specific outcomes or they haven't, and they are much better at gaming their responses so either way, that group is always much more data driven (from an interview assessment perspective).

As to Chandler, I think that the failure there is more basic. It's pure 1.0/3.0 paradox; namely, never getting arms around a realistic set of 1.0 deliverables that met a target market's 1.0 needs.

Kapor was all about an abstract 3.0 vision without any sense of 1.0 pragmatic realities, which is pretty universally a recipe for death, especially when you don't have the hard pressures of CASH RUNWAY and you have a LEGEND driving the ship (especially one who is decidedly not a tactical product guy) since the predominantly tech oriented team tends to be reticent about saying BULLSHIT. I DON'T GET IT.

Such companies regularly shift between vision, strategy and tactics, never differentiating what is what, and what has to happen in what order for the company to succeed.

[John "Z-Bo" Zabroski]

All good points... but if we're targeting basic stuff, then isn't the most sensible reply, "Do I get to pick who my team members are?" I guess this is another way of phrasing my complaint: Where are the people in this question? Who am I working with? How unique is my target user?

At the end of the day, your question doesn't matter to me if my team sucks. Software is a contact, team sport.

Truly great programmers don't just listen, they take feedback and use it as a tool to educate design.

Also, there is no more "basic" failure than saying you are going to build something revolutionary and not even settle on whether e-mails should be stored in the calendar, or calendar dated should be stored in e-mail. Instead, there was this abstract "silos" concept with no definitive meaning. There was no 3.0 vision. It was hand-waving.

Focusing too early on a 3.0 vision is just entropy and the natural tendency for things to increase in complexity.

[Mark Sigal]

Well, I can only speak for my own hiring experience, and post-mortems on good and bad hires.

Part of your point is what interviewees should be trying to grok before deciding if the company is the right team company for them.

In this thread, I am wearing the company hat and team builder perspective.

As to Chandler group, it somewhat reminds me of an old Steve Martin joke about how to become a millionaire. He says, firmly tongue in cheek, "First, get a million dollars."

Vision and ideas are cheap as Dennis poetically notes:

Ideas? We've had 'em
Since Eve deceived Adam,
But take it from me
Execution's the key.

Mark

[John "Z-Bo" Zabroski]

Sure, you are the team builder, but I am the pig who gets to select his waller. There are many places for me to immerse myself in mud, but I'm still going to pick the waller I like the most.

Interviewing is a two-way street, and really good programmers aren't concerned about passing the interview so much as determining if his/her coworkers are the kinds of people he wants to roll in the mud with.

Yes, "execution's the key", and that means getting the right people.

FWIW, you are right on about people being afraid to say, "BULLSHIT. I DON'T GET IT." It takes someone with true power - either financial power or expert power - to say that aloud. And only the expert can say it without looking stupid. It's rare where someone with financial power will say it e.g. Mark Cuban.

[John "Z-Bo" Zabroski]

...and of course, there are CEOs who literally don't want people who can think for themselves. Charles Simonyi of Intentional Software is a good example... he wrote a thesis about a management principle he called Metaprogramming, which was basically Taylor-istic management applied to software engineering.

By the way, it might sound tacky, but my recommended book for getting rich is The Richest Man in Babylon.