Also some strategies I'd call "mean" can be very effective: predatory pricing, monopolization, regulatory capture, disregarding externalities, lying, fraud, etc.
Its the 2020s and mean is doing numbers.
But once one becomes an adult, there is a much greater leeway in choosing whom to interact with, so it is often possible to not interact with mean people at all.
Look at the most successful people of recent times and you will quickly see a consistent pattern of meanness when you dig into how they work with others: - Steve Jobs - Bill Gates - Elon Musk - Sam Altman - Etc.
Bill Gates is not just unfaithful, he even considered slipping his wife STD medication to avoid having to talk about his state of affairs. He's now alone and the only people willing to care for him are probably very few old friends he didn't alienate, yet. The rest is just after his money.
Steve Jobs was an infamously bad father and husband, just as Elon Musk and they both suffered from it. Elon Musks own daughter is attacking him online. Think about that.
Elon Musk is on top of that a seriously pathetic individual. That is pretty obvious, isn't it.
Sam Altman ... I mean, just the accusations are so cringe and ignominious.
None of those people strike me as authentically happy and fulfilled. They all overstepped the mark and paid for it dearly or are in the process of doing so. They all suffered from their habits of being reckless and lacking compassion.
If failing for you means being broke or "not rich", then yes. But that would be a very narrow interpretation. Certainly not mine. I seriously pity all of them.
Sam Altman ... I mean, just the accusations are so cringe
TBH the pursuit of great wealth and the world of startups is not the line of work to pursue if the goal is to be "authentically happy and fulfilled".
If you read Walter Isaacson's book on Musk it's pretty clear that his kids do love him, he does care for them well, and that his "daughter" fell into pretty extremist ideology.
edit: this book? https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/1/23895069/walter-isaacson-...
You should read the book, it’s pretty good. Isaacson is not at all biased towards Musk, he has a lot of critical things to say about him. The author is one of the most trusted and thorough biographers of his generation and is known for extensive primary-source research.
This verge article is cope, they are a very politically biased organization. Linking to them is the equivalent of me linking to Fox News and trying to pass it off as unbiased.
Also, those are not scare quotes. His “daughter” is a man pretending to be a woman because of mental illness and extremist ideology.
Sure, there are normies with greater levels of personal happiness (as well as plenty of nice normies who also managed to fall out with significant people in their lives for one reason or another), but I don't think PG is likely to consider them higher achievers, even if they're significantly more secure and happy in their career than some of those individuals.
Does Paul know Musk, Bezos, Trump, Thiel, etc., etc.?
It feels like this didn't age well. An optimistic product of its time. But perhaps it's a question of time horizon. Mean people eventually fail, but it's the political version of the saying, the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Or perhaps "don't be mean" primarily applies to the "little people".
I don't like the implication that all rich people (which is Graham's criterion for success) are nice. Didn't Musk and Thiel read drafts of his later essays?
Ruthless and diplomatic (where it matters) gets you ahead. Ruthlessness is often indistinguishable from meanness.
Is lying mean? You need to lie a lot to get ahead,
When it comes to getting an advantage, people often look the other way at meanness.
For example, it’s easy to complain about how Amazon treats their employees. Yet, we choose to buy from Amazon because it’s convenient, cheap, and everyone else is doing it.
We might see an organization treat someone else unfairly but when resources are scarce, we often look the other way because it feels like there is nothing one person can do.
I like the old black and white movie, The Invisible Man, to demonstrate the situation of a specific type of meanness that seems ever present today. The enemy is invisible and is only defeated when the entire community gets involved.
I'm sure there are shitty managers at Amazon (in warehouses and in software) but by and large I believe blue collar Amazon workers have it about as well as blue collar workers everywhere. Maybe better.
I don't really see the problem here.
If a company is measuring the duration and frequency of bathroom breaks (to pick one of many examples that's been highlighted in the press), something has gone fundamentally wrong.
Exactly what I was thinking as I was tapping the thread link, strange to see the exact same words on the screen a second later.
Either what pg considers means is radically different from what I consider mean, or we have different things in mind when thinking about success, or he lives in a different world.
Several counter examples immediately come to mind, and not only in the startup world. Granted, it's probably easier today than in 2014 but still. It feels utterly naive. The whole piece. For instance:
> Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending.
Well, sure, if eliminating all your competitors by burning investor cash and if breaking the law left and right or disregarding ethics or the environment is considered transcending and not attacking or being mean. Now, maybe that stuff is considered fair game in pg's world.
It may be that successful mean people just hide it well enough to seem nice and the "x-ray vision" of the author's wife doesn't work on everyone. Once a mean person's position is unassailable, the velvet gloves come off. Alternatively, money is power and power corrupts.
The current crop of billionaires are at the pinnacle of success (depending on how you define it), but most sure don't seem very nice, and that's with a large PR team working overtime to hide the meanness.
> For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.
> That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.
What’s changed?
Edit:
The paragraph after should be included also, I think
And there's plenty of zero-sum in success today. Politics is the most obvious example. I can't be a Senator without excluding someone else from being a Senator. Your startup might be creating value, but the funding it needs is funding that can't go to other startups. The economy is not zero-sum because things have different value to different people, but money is zero-sum aside from banks playing tricks.
The idea is patently absurd in any case. There are plenty of successful mean people out there, including one extremely successful mean person who became particularly successful after this essay was written and is so notorious that I don't even have to name him for you to know who I'm talking about.
This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to.
I accept that the successful people pg knows are nice to him. Maybe they're even nice in general. But extrapolating that to "being mean makes you fail" is absurd.
> This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to.
Think about the names tied to Graham, the ones who appear in this very essay even. I think you’re making a gross understatement here—a slight even—of the massive influence of the likes of Dan Gackle.
*mean to Paul Graham. I’ve worked with a lot of mean people in important positions in my career, and they all have a kind, charismatic side when they need to. Those same people are awful to subordinates or people that can’t do something for them. Paul is high value to many people, so they treat him well.
People like Graham who aren’t often in positions where they’re taken advantage of or humbled like to pretend they and their peers are magnanimous and kind but often enough they’re just not exposed to the forces that make people ugly. All other things being equal: it’s often lack of agency over work and over their own lives—this shows up in work where people are given lots of responsibility but without the freedom to fulfill it.
I often find it concerning how elementary a lot of well off tech peoples’ theory of mind is. People are not acausal personalities, they are functions of their internals and their environments. A person mean at a stressful job might be delightful at a party after.
This is a great way of putting it. I always get surprised when I discover that others aren't constantly modeling a theory-of-mind of other people as a part of interacting with people. That's leaving aside whether those models are accurate, people have varying degrees of skill at it, but it shocks me when I discover that some people don't do it at all, badly or otherwise.
> Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them. They can hire people who will put up with them because they need a job. But the best people have other options. A mean person can't convince the best people to work for him unless he is super convincing. And while having the best people helps any organization, it's critical for startups.
This is just lame, self-serving rationale. One of the most vapid arguments I read in recent memory.
It's the sort of rationale that results in "good people are successful, therefore successful people are good".
Winning quite often has nothing to do with being good or mean, and only with being related to the correct people and having access to more money. This, paired with the fact that most people with a lot of money are all sociopaths does not paint a very rosy "mean people fail" bullshit.
First, there's this assumption that "startups" are what really matter. Sorry, pg, I know you've made a nice career out of them, but startups aren't very significant.
Then the part you quoted assumes that "the best people" are never themselves mean. There's plenty of smart, mean people who might gravitate towards other mean people. And plenty of really good people will put up with meanness if they believe in the mission. Just read all the stories about the early days of Apple. Jobs was a terror, but his people believed they were changing the world and they accepted Jobs as a necessary part of it.
pg is basically sitting in a tiny isolated island village and saying, "Isn't it amazing how every successful person on the planet is also a devoted worshipper of the Volcano God?"
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