Searching for outliers | benkuhn.net
most important things are outlier-driven • draw lots of samples • filter for maybe-amazing, not probably-good • learn where your bar should be • expect to fail a lot
Shortly after I started blogging, because I was a college student and had nothing better to do, I set a goal to write every week. I started in September 2013 and wrote around 150 posts between then and when I started working at Wave. (At that point I stopped having nothing better to do, so my blogging frequency tanked.) The outcomes of these 150 posts were extremely skewed: Two made it big on the Hacker News frontpage ( What happened to all the non-programmers and Readability, hackability, and abstraction ). After seeing the second post on HN, Dan Luu subscribed to my blog and started submitti
Explore this link on the map →saved by
- Anson Yu
- c l
- Amir
- Benjamin Laufer
- Jaclyn
- Pranav
- Kelly Chong
- Justin Wang
- Elizabeth Qiu
- Bonnie Chin
- Alex K George
- Annie Zhou
related reading
- How To Be Successful - Sam Altmanblog.samaltman.com
- Be less scared of overconfidence | benkuhn.netbenkuhn.net
- Think more about what to focus on - by Henrik Karlssonhenrikkarlsson.xyz
- How do you find your people, when searching is itself an antipattern? | Kevin Liukliu.io
- Prospecting for Gold | Effective Altruismeffectivealtruism.org
- The trouble in comparing different approaches to science fundingscienceplusplus.org
- How To Attract Luck: The Science Behind How People Get Lucktaylorpearson.me
- How much do people differ in productivity? What the evidence says. | 80,000 Hours80000hours.org
- If You're Not First, You're (Maybe? Potentially? Probably?) Last0xsmac.substack.com
- Why the tails come apart — LessWronglesswrong.com
- Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent (Ep. 186) | Conversations with Tylerconversationswithtyler.com
- A Smart Bearlongform.asmartbear.com