[Paul Graham and The Lesson to Unlearn]
I started off this morning reading an essay by Y Combinator Founder Paul Graham about how students in schools are being taught the wrong things -- namely, to win at tests, to prove they are competitive.
The link to entrepreneurship? Graham believes that young founders who are just starting out think that the key to becoming a successful founder is to somehow trick people into believing in you.
He points to a series of discussions he typically has when young entrepreneurs come to office hours to talk about raising money or "being noticed".
He says they come up with hare-brained ideas like "launching on a Tuesday" because Tuesday is when you are most likely to get noticed.
Graham wonders why are these founders making things complicated, instead of just working on a great product that people will love.
"Why did founders tie themselves in knots doing the wrong things when the answer was right in front of them? Because that was what they'd been trained to do. Their education had taught them that the way to win was to hack the test. And without even telling them they were being trained to do this. The younger ones, the recent graduates, had never faced a non-artificial test. They thought this was just how the world worked: that the first thing you did, when facing any kind of challenge, was to figure out what the trick was for hacking the test. That's why the conversation would always start with how to raise money, because that read as the test. It came at the end of YC. It had numbers attached to it, and higher numbers seemed to be better. It must be the test."
This makes me think about things like "Growth hacking," which is not a real thing. It's a mnemonic device that some people in Silicon Valley came up with because they know it attracts young people who believe that marketing is something you do to "hack" the attention of people that leads to growth.
These young founders would soon learn if they were marketing employees of any corporate brand with a digital presence, that these "hacks" were already being done, as long ago as 30 years ago.
But why is the allure of the hack so compelling? Back to Graham's point, everyone who is being taught is also being conditioned. The distance between knowledge building and working on real problems that use that knowledge is huge.
Being a founder, in my opinion, is truly about finding a passion for something and then making a solution built out of rules that resonate in other people's hearts in minds. In other words, it's working with other people, communicating with them, and building a solution for them that not only fixes a problem they have, but inspires them to live a better life.
You do that with three skills, I think:
1. Communicating your own thoughts about the problem to a person experiencing a problem
2. Listening to their response with the intention to understand
3. Working hard until you get the real answer
In doing so, there is no hackable way to solve their problem. You have to continually "quest" for the solution, by building and failing, and building and failing. The failing is the key point.
According to Graham, we are taught that the solution to everything is to be perfect at getting the grade, to prove we are smart.
In fact, out in the real world, we are only really learning when we are applying a solution to a problem, seeing it fail, and then asking deeper questions about how to get it right.
For founders, the spirit of learning is in getting it right. That takes a really long time. Before you try to get noticed by investors, by the media, by anyone you need to get noticed by the customer who has a real problem, and has also failed in solving it.
The true test of entrepreneurship is whether or not can you learn in a way that teaches other people, too.
On December 16, we close applications for AW#20, an accelerator class that is devoted to blockchain and AI founders. You can apply here: http://bit.ly/2rxLzLi
Source material
http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
Doug Crets
Communications Master, AppWorks Accelerator
wonders grade 3 在 國立臺灣大學 National Taiwan University Facebook 的最讚貼文
💠💠取之於社會用之於社會: GMBA致力於社區服務💠💠
NTU GMBA: Devoted to Service
文: GMBA辦公室
英文撰寫: GMBA一年級 谷柔蘭 Lauren Grimm
社區服務與回饋社會一直是身為GMBA一份子的我們的共同心願,接續先前GMBA學長姐曾造訪學校、孤兒院與民間機構的愛心行動,今年 3月20日GMBA學生會再度籌畫桃園市大溪區員樹林小學的訪問行程。 這次是由會長Tina Lai所帶領的團隊,包括Christopher Chen、Nick Herschel、Thanyanun Pruekwattanachai、Shyam Shankar、Julian Wolf、Ramon Scherrer和Rufo Calderon等來自七個國家的GMBA一二年級同學。 GMBA同學先向員樹林小學的小朋友們介紹自己來自的國家與文化背景,並分享有關泰國、德國、瑞士、印度、美國等地的風土民情。小朋友非常認真的聽哥哥姐姐們的簡報,不僅能立刻記住這些國家流行的食物、文化與生活模式,甚至在訪問結束前已經熟記各種語言的問候語!
員樹林國小的校長非常感謝台大GMBA這次的造訪,特地頒發感謝證書給所有出席的同學,我們希望不久的將來可以再來學校跟小朋友們分享,並將我們對文化和服務的熱愛傳遞給更多其他GMBA的同學與學弟妹們。
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Community service and giving back are close to the hearts of many in our program. On March 20, a group of GMBA students set out on a half-day trip to Yuanshulin Elementary School in Daxi, Taoyuan. Led by Tina Lai, the team included Christopher Chen, Nick Herschel, Thanyanun Pruekwattanachai, Shyam Shankar, Julian Wolf, Ramon Scherrer, and Rufo Calderon. Our GMBA students shared their different cultural backgrounds with second-grade students at the school, introducing them to the wonders of Thailand, Germany, Switzerland, India, and the United States. The students learned all about the popular foods and cultural gestures from the different countries. By the end of the visit, they'd even learned how to greet one another in a variety of languages! The school's principal expressed the appreciation of the school and students, presenting our GMBA team with certificates of thanks. We hope to visit again with the students and continue to share our love of culture and service.
(Chinese text by NTU GMBA Office; English text by Lauren Grimm, 1st-year student of NTU GMBA Program)