Ben Casnocha

As an attorney, I’m always concerned that my writing will not be my best work and people will think that I suck. Or that something I write will come back and bite me in the ass when I run for office or get vetted for some high powered job. However, fear or perfectionism can be paralyzing. Even as an attorney, you have to produce a lot of crap to produce good stuff. Judge Posner comes to mind. He blogs, writes about everything under the sun, and is brutally honest about his opinions regardless of the cost. Some of it is probably not the best and some of his opinions are off the wall. He also happens to be the most cited American appellate judge. Ben Casnocha touched on this here: http://ben.casnocha.com/2010/05/career-lessons-from-elena-kagan-vs-ric…

Programming is a non-scalable career (in the Talebian sense[1]), like being a lawyer or doctor. The relationship in earnings vs success is much closer to linear, with the most successful programmers getting only about 10x (100x if we'rereally generous, but probably more like 2-4x on average) more than the least. In contrast pro sports are a scalable career, where incomes can scale separately from effort, similar to movie stars, authors and musicians. The relationship is an exponential with the very best earning the lion share of the income of the entire industry, earning literally millions of times more than those at the bottom of the industry. Given a certain amount of effort invested in your career so far, if you know you're middle of the road of a scalable career, and it's becoming less and less likely that you'll hit the top 1 percentile, then I would think that the likelihood that you should perhaps look to change career should be much higher than if you were middle of the road in a non scalable career. [1] https://casnocha.com/2009/03/scalable-vs-non-scalable-careers.html

> But if you even need to write that long-ass prompt, might as well just write the story yourself! Nah, that's just restating the infamous 'how to draw an owl' advice: https://casnocha.com/2010/11/how-to-draw-an-owl.html#comment-6a00d8341… The thing is, that "long-ass prompt" is step 1, and LLM then draws "the rest of the fucking owl" for you. That's quite a big difference to doing it all yourself.

Arguably it has been for a while: https://casnocha.com/review-cowens-infovore

setup in a 'winner takes all' kind of way Photography is what is known as a scalable profession. A quick search turned up this good explanation: http://casnocha.com/2009/03/scalable-vs-non-scalable-careers.html It's something I've been thinking about as I try to guide my children into selecting a college and major.

This is the distinction between scalable and non-scalable. I first read of it in one of Nassim Taleb's books (where he advises people to pick a non-scalable career, since the outcomes are more certain and the risks lower) but I'm sure it's been written about many other times. Ben Casnocha talks about it a bit [0]. Startups aim to be scalable. But you should note that you don't have to start out scalable. Doing so might be seen as a premature optimization. You could hand-service your first dozen customers, and worry about scaling only when you start counting your customers in hundreds rather than tens. [0] http://casnocha.com/2009/03/scalable-vs-non-scalable-careers.html

A post by one of TechStars mentors: http://casnocha.com/2009/06/understanding-what-keeps-a-person-up-at-ni…

I try to seek out new experiences, social or otherwise. This past year I started keeping a short diary of semi-significant events - a concert I went to, a date I had, a problem I solved at work. My goal with the diary was to make time slow down (without moving) and it has definitely worked. It's really fun to read back through it. The idea of slowing time down comes from here: http://ben.casnocha.com/2011/05/why-to-move-to-a-new-place-it-slows-do…

agreed, here's a direct link http://ben.casnocha.com/2010/11/how-to-draw-an-owl.html#comment-6a00d8…

Ben even posted the comment as a separate blog post. (Also, the Disqus anchor link often doesn't work.) The 30 Steps to Mastery http://ben.casnocha.com/2010/11/the-30-steps-to-mastery.html

This reminded me of the post from Ben Casnocha on living out the "do one thing that scares you" advice: http://ben.casnocha.com/2010/07/living-out-the-do-one-thing-that-scare…

What was the most frequent mistake the company made? http://ben.casnocha.com/2007/08/what-was-your-m.html

I was feeling similarly for a long time except on one point: I think you are really wrong about taking a different path being futile. Your reason for not starting something new because you won't compare to people who have been doing it for years is not a good reason. There are tons of people who have been doing their job for years and are just plain not good at their job at all. Aim for their jobs for now. If you pick something else you want to do you are definitely going to end up being better than they are if you bust your ass. And they have jobs. So what is stopping you from beating them? Nothing. You said you view yourself as more hardworking and intelligent than most people, even some very successful friends. Well part of the gift of being intelligent is that you have the capability of retooling yourself and picking up something new. You also have the other component for being able to do that as well, being hardworking. Things are guaranteed to not get any better if you don't do anything, and your reasons for not doing anything are not good ones. If you are a smart, hardworking person and you set a reasonable goal for yourself there should be nothing holding you back barring your own motivation. Finally, if you actually do decide to get moving in a direction, print this out and put it on your wall: http://casnocha.com/2010/11/the-30-steps-to-mastery.html