Granted I don't pay much attention to the y-combinator side of all this, but I didn't know who this dude was when I read the article. I immediately disliked a lot of the advice because of how out-of-touch it is (don't do something you don't like, buy a $4000 mattress, etc.) and came to the comments expecting some level of critique of that. Nope, everyone is fawning over this guy:
"What do you think he'll think when he starts meditating" "How do you feel about him using canabis?"
Person X becomes successful. Other people ask X how they did it. Person X explains some personal philosophy, and the other people nod sagely. Then persons Y, Z, and Q follow the recipe by X, and do not become successful.
It's probably better to ask failures what they did wrong. You end up with rules like "don't ever try heroin", "always insure the things that make you money", "let your lawyer review it first", "get a pre-nup", and "keep offsite backups". Most spend a lot of time figuring out exactly where it all went wrong, and can tell you exactly what they should have done differently to not fail (from that particular cause).
It's almost like there is more to success whether or not someone sleeps on a tempurpedic mattress with a cooling pad, earplugs and eye mask... or whether they write lists on paper... or whether they have that unfortunate characteristic where they only work on stuff they don't like (you know, a job)
To me, the talk of such things suggests that they don't actually know where their success comes from. Or they do know, and need to sell a distracting narrative for some reason. Perhaps the more people that know about it, the less it would work for them.
I've been reading HN for at least 4 years and I always knew there was some level of bootlicking around the ycombinator stuff but it was easy enough to ignore and move on. I couldn't do that this time.
"What do you think he'll think when he starts meditating" "How do you feel about him using canabis?"
What kind of cult is this?
ed: spelling