Thought-provoking metaphor. Upon reflection, I think the article emphasizes the wrong aspect of this -- the drip part itself -- at the expense of the more interesting elements (the length and breadth of the horizontal line, the amount of paint, etc).
CURIOSITY seems to be the horizontal line; i.e. the person's latent curiosity about things, domains, areas, etc, and the urge to explore/discover is what drives the horizontal movement.
The 'amount of paint' variable, which is clearly the most important part of the physical reality underpinning the metaphor, would perhaps be akin to COMPETENCE. Competence is a stand-in word for intelligence, grit, suitable background knowledge, and probably a host of other qualities.
So what's the grand conclusion here? That highly curious and highly competent people tend to be prolific in their output?
Not so surprising perhaps, but fun to think about.
Self replying with another thought: I always find it remarkable when really young founders (like college-age) are successful, because they lack so much understanding about the world, business, people, etc. BUT they likely have a great deal more curiosity and drive than older folks.
Maybe there's some sweet spot, where founders have enough real-world experience to understand how the world works, and how to build things, but are still curious and driven enough to jump off and try.
Past that point, I fear that curiosity starts declining even as competence increases - say, when you're 50, will you get the feeling you 'know' the world in-and-out, you 'know' there's no easy opportunities... and besides, you have a teenager-filled family, a mortgage, etc all of which perhaps stifle really broad-ranging curiosity not least because your time has more demands on it.
I think that there is also a certain (to a large degree realistic) pessimism that comes with age. It's not just that younger people are less risk averse (though they are), it's that they are less likely to think that they will fail.
Lots of successful startups could have a post-hoc analysis of "Holy shit we were stupid, but we worked hard and got lucky"
Or, as a friend of mine put it, inexperienced people don't succeed because they know something that experienced people do, they succeed because they don't know something that experienced people do.
Reminds me of Pixel (the cat from Heinlein novels and others), who teleports and travels through walls because the cat simply does not know such feats are impossible.
It's a not-unusual theory, but it's bumping into something I'd really like to avoid (especially on HN), which is negative generalizations of different age/gender/racial/familystatus/etc. demographics in business contexts.
(In the US, a super HR person's Spidey Sense would tingle, and they'd fly across the building and yank the keyboard out of someone's hands, before certain sentences could be finished. Then sit down for a constructive discussion about why generalizations are not only counterproductive and unfair, but also a big policy no-no at most established US companies. But on HN, we just have to frequently ask to please stop saying that.)
It's also not really helpful to generalize like that in the sense that I've known plenty of 50+ senior engineers who were very curious and very capable. And they often had a lot of advice about pitfalls to avoid when applying new technologies because they had used the same technology 20 years ago when it was called something else or sold by a different vendor. People often deride experience on here, but I've gotten a lot of mileage professionally out of learning from other peoples' experiences. Occasionally I have to explain that "yes, things are really different now" but that's good because if I'm wrong about that I get to find out before I invest a bunch of time in a bad approach.
You hear about the young founders because they are the exception. Research shows most successful ones are in their late 40s. I also take issue with curiosity changing over time. If anything, it's naiveté. Young founders charge ahead and a few get lucky.
I like that! I would tweak the "amount of paint" from Competence to Enthusiasm. If you have Curiosity + Enthusiasm, the rest will take care of itself. That's why a 25 year old who just learned programming is more likely to develop an innovative new database than a 45 year old database expert who has "seen it all."
My first thought was "people that do the boring enough stuff comparable to watching paint drip/dry" so dunno whether name is all that good or not.
But I definitely acquired some skills in similar method, just doing something, hitting a snag and exploring some niche of debugging or code to get that tiny speck of knowledge while otherwise not knowing all that much about adjacent subjects.
Thanks for sharing! I often call myself a flat bar, because I'm missing the one specialization for the T-shape. This description of the 'paint drip person' hit really close to home, so I think that that's what I'll call myself in the future.
This also resonates with me. That's one of the reasons I am not on the development side of things. In the systems side you need to know some of everything.
> Once it starts rolling, it’s not clear how far it will go. In any case, the brush keeps moving.
I like this. Sounds like one can have multiple drips going at once, including some that hve been dripping for a long time.
> Eventually the last drip stops and a new one starts.
Is this sentence saying that at some point the multiple ongoing drips might stop (or slow to a crawl), but the person is still learning, because they're already starting new drips?
I'd prefer to avoid misinterpretations of short-attention-span or serial-dabbler.
Also, the characterization of T-shaped here speaks of interests, but the motivations for skill development might actually be necessities, such as in an early startup. The interest can be a side-effect of something needing doing. You start to dig into the solution domain, anchored around a real problem, and it becomes interesting.
The unplanned nature of the areas and projects. Doing deep dives implies agency. The concept here is that the paint drips are unpredictable and unexpected, which could lead to significance and could just be a waste of time :)
A particular type of essay that HN is an absolute sucker for — an awesome type of person that you're supposed to identify with. Paint Drip Person. T-Shaped Person. Paul Graham has also written a bunch of these, so maybe it's just in the DNA of the site.
I guess the classical example of this is the renaissance man, but that at least required different fields like art and science and not different kinds of programming.
It's a certain kind of content. I might invoke Godin's Law (not Godwin, Godin): the evocation of an idea feels better and more significant if you leave it extremely vague, and draw no useful conclusions from it :)
Put any of this stuff into practice and you run into practical issues, and it's way less interesting.
I'm definitely a paint drip dude and it's not at all useful. In the absence of a team of cultists to do my bidding, any paint drip that stops is then useless to go further, and the metaphor breaks down. It becomes 'abstractly looking at a pile of uncompleted projects', and even when my job is coming up with stuff of that nature, I have to finish the stuff for it to matter, even to me.
I have two friends. One lives by “Don’t be a drip, ‘real artists ship’”. He’s got ~20 products shipped. The other friend drips hard, with a comparable number of projects abandoned over a comparable timeframe.
Both spent about two decades living in near poverty and only recently experienced financial success.
I don’t believe telling either of them to switch strategies would have been helpful.
We could infer from these two cases that “don’t give up” is the unifying factor, and that that’s helpful advice. I think history is littered with counter examples. Giving up may not be psychologically healthy (or advisable), but advising somebody “don’t give up” can still be cruel and unhelpful. Resisting the urge to give advice may be kindest.
I suspect most advice broadcast on the internet does more to inflate the author’s reputation than to help the audience. Even if this is true, it doesn’t rule out the possibility of a small quantity of exceptional advice having an outsized positive impact that outweighs the over abundance of reputation inflating advice.
Yes, these post-hoc explanations for why someone is successful allow us to indulge in fantasies of success without providing any actionable advice that has actual empirical evidence.
I still get a kick out of the fact that the person that came up with Nerd Merit Badges is the same person that came up with the term fullstack and almost nobody mentions it or even gets the original meaning of the term.
So actually a full-stack developer, according to the person who coined the term, is not just someone who can do backend and front-end, but you need to have the design (and business) chops too.
Except the "paint drip" aspect of this successful person might be entirely irrelevant to their success. Imagine if Keith ate oatmeal every day for breakfast, and there was an "Oatmeal people" article describing why eating oatmeal for breakfast is the key to Ken's success. After all, it gives him long lasting energy, having a routine can be useful, it is simple to prepare and you can think about other things while making it, etc.
Or, for every "paint drip person", you might find another person who is equally as successful and devoted their entire energy to a single project or idea.
Well let’s say I find a super successful restaurant that makes its burritos one way. I’m amazed. I’m inspired. I write a book about it and describe the specific ways that they do things that make them successful.
Then a few years later, I find another super successful burrito restaurant. They make it completely opposite to what I wrote in my book.
It turns out the reasons for success runs deeper than the superficial things that you see people do day to day.
For every successful person that reads a book a week, there’s probably 5 that just laze on the couch.
> For every successful person that reads a book a week, there’s probably 5 that just laze on the couch.
I understand that not every successful person reads a book a week (or s/a book a week/any other "productive" habit often bandied about in articles like this), but I really doubt that very many successful people habitually laze on the couch.
This analogy seems like a stretch. An artist that has paint dripping from their strokes strikes me as sloppy. Is this analogy really tied to a single specific type of painting?
I believe the analogy is more a reference to the shape of paint drips as seen in the image on the page. The T model of skills has a single "descender" that represents deep knowledge in a single topic, whereas paint drips represent varying depths of knowledge in several areas.
It's a good enough analogy to go deeper than that. The T model is an intentional, planned descender. The paint drip thing implies that you don't know which drips are going to go where, or what will turn up. It's a more flexible approach that will be quicker to seize on underlying conditions people are just beginning to discover. The terrain defines what you end up doing, and if something takes off, the paint drip types are going to be all over it, even though it's not planned.
It's not that useful of an observation because you must then ask what you're going to do about it, but it is a valid observation all the same. This mode of being does exist. My career's based on being that, and also putting in the effort to finish things: otherwise it would be pure dilettantism.
Yeah but if you don't have attached article the first thing I'm gonna think about is "sloppy" or "this person is into boring tasks like watching paint dry"
CURIOSITY seems to be the horizontal line; i.e. the person's latent curiosity about things, domains, areas, etc, and the urge to explore/discover is what drives the horizontal movement.
The 'amount of paint' variable, which is clearly the most important part of the physical reality underpinning the metaphor, would perhaps be akin to COMPETENCE. Competence is a stand-in word for intelligence, grit, suitable background knowledge, and probably a host of other qualities.
So what's the grand conclusion here? That highly curious and highly competent people tend to be prolific in their output?
Not so surprising perhaps, but fun to think about.