I spent the first chunk of my career doing sales (2nd half spent in software engineering). Theres a lot of good books out there but you're going to find a lot of the direct advice to be non-applicable (as I'm sure you can pick up from the comments). Most of the Literature out there is directed at professional sales people, who for the most part are non-technical, have the backing of a marketing org, and are also different than a founder. Anyway, heres a reading list. Most of the trainings I've been a part of were custom built to the org or market, and frankly I learned more from Rules of the Game by Neil Strauss. I did enjoy "the Wedge" training by Randy Schwantz... that one you should do the video not the book. It also sounds like you could use some marketing stuff so I'll throw some of that in there too.
In no particular order, and please keep in mind this is off the top of my head:
* The presentation secrets of steve jobs (just a good book on presentations, framed around Steve Jobs to sell more)
For what its worth this question comes up fairly often. It seems like technical people would like a "technical people" guide on how to do Sales and marketing. Does that sound useful to anyone?
Ted Chang, Bunch Books on Roman Architecture, "You, me, and Ulysses S. Grant", Raving Fans (for work), 3 body Problem, Not the end of the world, Anti-fragile (3rd time), Transformed (for work, it was trash), Harry Potter (in Spanish), and some other things I can't think of off the top of my head.
sure, we went to Rome and I was surprised to find that much of the architecture didn't present as I was expecting. I took a bunch of photos. When I came home I checked out "The Romans: builders of an empire" and then the wife bought me "Roman architecture in 50 monuments" which was really cool. I've subsequently read up on the aqueducts... which are really really cool
It's actually a different crawler for training data: Googlebot-extended so you can exclude yourself from the training data though not the search summaries.
I'm not sure of the legality but I definitely appreciate their product. This lawsuit seems odd because google themselves scrape content for their indexes. From what I see SerpApi is really just providing a machine interface that Google themselves refuses to provide users and visibility into SERPs which is also something that users should have available to them.
Google publishes how to control their bot - with robots.txt. They then obey those instructions. Google also takes some effort to not use all your bandwidth. Google isn't perfect, but they are at least making a "good faith" effort to be nice and this does count in court. Overall most will agree that in general what google does to allow people to find their website is worth the things that google is doing.
You can of course argue a lot of edge cases if you really want. For the most part I want to say "it isn't worth the argument". In some cases I will take your side if I really have to think about it, but in general the system google has been using mostly works and is mostly an acceptable compromise.
But their robots are enabled by default. So it is a form of unsolicited scraping. If I spam millions of email addresses without asking for permission but provide a link to opt-out form, am I the good guy?
At this point everyone knows about robots.txt, so if you didn't opt-out that is your own fault. Opting out of everyone at once is easy, and you get fine grained control if you want it.
Also most people would agree they are fine with being indexed in general. That is different from email spam where people don't want it.
Looking at SerpApi clients, looks like most companies would agree they are fine with scraping Google. That is different from having your website content stolen and summarized by AI on Google search, which people don't want.
The claim is SerApi is not honoring robots.txt, and they are getting far more data from google/more often than needed for an index operation. Or at least that is the best I can make out of the claim in court from the article - I have not read the actual complaint.
People are generally fine with indexing operations so long as you don't use too much bandwidth.
Using AI to summarize content is still and open question - I wouldn't be surprised if this develops to some form of "you can index but not summarize", but only time will tell.
Do you have an example of a court saying that violating robots.txt violates an existing law?
In Ziff Davis v. OpenAI [1], the District Court for the Southern District of New York found that violating robots.txt does not violate DMCA section 1201(a) (formally 17 U.S. Code § 1201(a), which prohibits circumvention of technological protection measures of copyrighted content [2]).
It's my understanding that robots.txt started as a socially-enforced rule and that it remains legally voluntary.
This is actually a super power I have after spending my first part of my career in sales.
I was never formally trained so I just keep asking "why" until someone proves it all the way. Sales itself is also a lot about asking questions that won't come up to find the heart of the thing people actually want... which is just another side of the coin.
I understand they are out there, I understand there is an ecosystem and they are important to that ecosystem... all that goes out the window when you see a great white cruising through the water. We're cool as long as they are out at sea and not where I'm at.
Yes, that's true of large predators in general, like tigers and grizzly bears. But traditionally, while people realize that these animals can be dangerous, people don't hate these animals but want to protect them, just away from people. This was different from the feeling towards sharks, which were hated. It is good that they are beginning to be viewed like other predators.
The doctrine is a no-nonsense, no-fluff document based on 200+ years of military tradition where the effectiveness of the leadership is actually life and death. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in leadership.
I think were it rewritten with the current leadership, the very first thing they'd remove would be this topic line:
> Army professionals recognize the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and treat them with respect
Both in political and corporate (especially tech) leadership, this principle has proven to be convenient to say and equally convenient to be tossed aside with the slightest provocation - people are seen as consumers, workers, undesirables, or chattel, not as beings with dignity, that is only for people in privileged positions.
Not only that, read the chapter on counterproductive leadership (toxic leadership). Try to tick the boxes for the current US president. Spoiler alert, he ticks all the boxes.
Is this really what they use to train commanding officers? It has all the hallmarks of a self-help book - vague advice coupled with some anecdotes - with a lot of bureaucratic fluff inbetween. How/why did the squad leader 'instinctively know' how to handle the reluctant machine gunner? Isn't that the opposite of training military personnel?
Because of the Ukraine conflict, the phrase "mission command" came to my attention. It's about C2 rather than leadership but another one of those gems we might filter out in our "Bay Area" (you're all terminally online Europeans / teenagers jk) bubble.
The idea of mission command is pretty simple. If you see an incidental opportunity that will contribute to the big picture and pursuing it won't compromise the objective of your orders, take it. IIRC they call it something like "scoped initiative."
If you see an incidental opportunity that you can't take because it would compromise your local objective, you escalate. Up the chain, in the larger scope, that incidental opportunity that would compromise the objective of the smaller unit may be addressable using some available resources of the bigger unit.
It works by deduction and beautifully because you get the best of both individual initiative and large-scale coordination. It's an example where from-first-principle CS and pragmatic emergent systems resonate because it's near a morally true optimum.
In the context of OP, knowing the objective of your larger 1-2 organization levels is all the transparency that is every necessary. Neurons aren't smart. Information flows in a network are smart. Don't trust people who start performing and asking for transparency because ninety-nine times out of ten, they can't do better with what they ask for but will make everyone else do worse by breaking the cohesion.
And finally I read OP. It's a vapid feel-good long-form tweet that is nothing compared to the comment section.
As a multiple time ground force commander both in Iraq and stateside for CI operations, I can firmly state that there is literally zero to be learned about leadership from corporate or political worlds.
When I left the USG because it’s fundamentally corrupt, I went into private business thinking there were technical/business leaders that had pro-social incentives, and their heads screwed on.
Man was I wrong.
The US military has by far the best, all encompassing, most focused and persistently updating leadership development and it’s STILL absolutely garbage.
There’s ZERO, and actually most likely negative, incentives to think about and apply ethics in business and politics, because at the end of the day the most ruthless will win in the long run.
There are no good organizations, only ones that aren’t completely corrupt yet. Consider that to start and maintain an organization takes significant capital and energy expenditures upfront, which means you need to fund them from somewhere and ask sources of funding are corrupted. Consider: there are no long lasting egalitarian, distributed power, grassroots organizations that can compete at a level of social influence that can overcome or resist the existing power structure.
I’ve looked at every possible organization that could theoretically fit including; MSF a.k.a. doctors without borders, swords to plowshares, goodwill industries (who employ significant numbers of disabled people for sub min wages while the CEO makes 3M+), Mondragon etc… and they all have exactly the same fucked up incentives
why? because there is no way to survive as a structure, if your org is made up of people who want to eat and don’t want to be a monk.
unless your organization is the lead maximalist resource dominator you will be overrun by some organization with no ethics
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that people have to trade physical and mental work for money to survive. So there is no alternative to do the “right thing” without also risking your own safety and stability in your chosen society. 99.99999% of people are completely unwilling to risk their life on behalf of any particular philosophy - if only because those people don’t feel strongly enough about any particular philosophy to actually put themselves on the line for it.
So whoever has the most money, has the ability to get the most people to work for their goals.
Unfortunately the people with all the money/power do not care about anything other than growing their own personal power
I would love to hear more about your definition of corruption and why it is inevitable. From what I can tell it is that an organization with “morals”, meaning some sort of code restricting their possible actions, will be out competed by an organization without “morals”, whatever that might be. I think it is compelling at face value, but I’m not sure I see a world of wolves out there. Maybe I’m naive.
I want to argue that the rule of law is one moral system that applies to all organizations. Sure, some overstep and may gain some advantage due to that. But in principle and hopefully on average the result should be net negative. In democratic countries the laws are more or less directly the will of the people, about as egalitarian as we can get, no? Anyways, following the rule of laws should lead to “morally sound” corporations as defined by the people. Corporations can go further than what is legally required, too. That is often used in marketing.
Finally i think the same principles apply wherever humans (or other species) compete. Humans on the whole are not entirely cruel barbarians, we try to care for individuals who are not able to care for themselves etc. Whether “true” altruism exists is another discussion, but it certainly looks like it. So if that’s how people act, why should corporations be more corrupt than the bodies that make them up and govern them?
Have you looked at sports federations (especially in Europe, not in US). They're primarily funded by membership fees, some survived over century, and while they have some governance issues (like conflict of interest due to wearing two hats – regulatory function and event organiszing one), it would be a strong claim to say that they're corrupted by their roots/nature.
In fact one of my close friends is a co-owner of the Kraken
Sports teams and leagues are primarily owned by billionaires - like the amount of discussion around who is the owner is a significant portion of sports reporting
The only exception I know off the top of my head I believe is the Packers are community owned but even then I would be skeptical as to how the power dynamics play out in practice
I think it’s a weak form of a mutual cooperative - which unfortunately doesn’t have the ability to defeat a state-billionaire backed corporation in the market.
I guess I don't know what you prefer, I'm guessing anarchy in the academic sense?
But I want to add, that workplace democracy would be turning the billionaire owned companies into democracies themselves. That is the goal of economic democracy at least, changing the fiefdoms into democracies can't be a worse system.
At the most basic biological level the human species can’t organize action larger than a few hundred people in any kind of coherent way.
There are no coherent organizations that are larger than a few hundred people.
It is a biological impossibility for the human species to maintain long lasting (thousands of years) groups that can have social structures that last long enough to encode genetic fitness changes at the rate of environmental change.,
We do not have the ability to comfortably maintain coherent heirarchies, and subordinated structures, around a coherent epistemological grounding.
Humans are not eusocial.
I just fundamentally don’t see any future for the species level organization whatsoever
I have always been in favor of changing the definition if incorporation to ensure that over time ownership transfers slowly but increasingly to the employees of the corporate entity. How that would work, though, would require detailed thought by experts more knowledgeable than i :)
> Sports teams and leagues are primarily owned by billionaires
My question was about sports federations, and not about leagues and commercial clubs (and definitely not in US). Take FIS (International Ski and Snowboard Federation) for example, or smaller European national and regional federations.
You could point to any organization smaller than 1000 people is being reasonably coherent I don’t think that this is relevant for the context we were discussing the Amish also doing a pretty good job and maintaining stable community but they are irrelevant
What context are you discussing? Parent comment talks about "all organisations".
You know what, forget it. I thought you have some interesting/insightful framework and thoughts about power/structures in organisations and happy to share it.
That means there does not exist a mechanism for one person or group, who has excess resources to reliably transfer those resources to another group in a way that does not have an implied return or reward function of some sort to the giver
Because of the nature of this transactional process it corrupts any possible transfer of power
So consolidated power in any form, is not equitable and the state of physics doesn’t allow for another regime. It’s a munchausen trilemma
I don't know man. I agree that transfer of resources are always mixed with incentives and power asymmetries, no questions about that. But "corrupted" (as opposed to "risks of being corrupted") is a word that means in my parlor "illegitimate and norm-breaking".
I’d be curious what you identified as the shortcomings of e.g. MSF or Mondragon. I might throw semi-decentralized social ventures like the IFRC in the mix there too: that emblem alone sure carries an almost-talismanic degree of social weight, seemingly worldwide, I think in large part because they’re foresworn from swinging around their influence outside of their lane.
And I mean… “don’t want to live like a monk” seems like a telling qualifier: the whole monastic lifestyle seems pretty widespread and enduring across cultures and through time… is the humbler mode of religious devotion an example of what you’re looking for?
In any case you’ve clearly thought deeply and widely about this question—I’d be interested to read your thoughts if you end up collecting them somewhere!
That's quite a strong claim. I disagree. Military leadership, like business leadership, is imperfect. Both vary based on individuals, the operating environment, and culture.
I'm pretty sure software development of a website doesn't translate to a life and death situation that US army is dealing with. If anything it's why there is so many managers who think this works as if we are solving lives so they have to be strict and we all have to be strict and everyone needs to have their story points updated.
The reason why most people went into software development is because they like building stuff so you have to inspire that - it's quite different to why people join US army.
My 2 cents on the actual manager philosophy is that it depends on the organization and the personal and cultural differences of the team members, some people like leaders, some people like servants and some like equality.
At the end of the day everyone has to be aware they do work for the business and why they do stuff. The manager has to make that aware and inspire people.
One of the things that bothers me about this (though indirect), which I say every time these articles are posted (about alcohol and health) is that we are working with an incomplete data set. It is absolutely true that the physical effects of any alcohol use are bad for your health, the problem is that we have no way to know if the social/psychological effects of moderate drinking outweigh the negatives... there has never been a longitudinal study on the matter, which is very frustrating.
We know that people who meet with their friends once a week for dinner are happier and have better health outcomes. We know that being married increases your lifespan. What story does alcohol with its deep cultural influence and use in social settings play in health outcomes - we don't know. We just know that alcohol is a poison, a poison that humans as a species have adapted to be able to consume and process better than other animals.
Speaking without any evidence whatsoever to back it up, I could totally imagine bimodal health impacts from alcohol where one group increases their health outcomes through moderate drinking as a social lubricant decreasing stress, increasing community, increasing the likelihood of marriage, and another group increases stress, isolation, and negative health impacts through excessive drinking.
Either way it would go, I would like real, empirical, LONGITUDINAL data to direct me on how to view alcohol, as opposed to the current state of things.
Courtney Love wrote a fabulous article explaining the realities of a million-dollar album (2000 - https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/) and it explains so much of whats actually going on that the public doesn't fully comprehend. Its a great read if you've never read it.
The realities are similar to what we are reading in this article. Most of what gets talked about is gross numbers not net. Most of the benefits of the job, are in the journey not the destination - if you're even into that stuff... i.e. having your music impact lives.
I wish sooooo much that people could read these things so when I go to a dinner party or random event, some GenPop person knew that JK Rowling makes billions of dollars but your average published writer loses money publishing a book. Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse.
Good on charli xcx for writing this and for writing period.
> Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse.
I'm not familiar with the financials of music / media production (I didn't read the linked article yet, sorry). But I feel this over-pitying attitude towards professional sports players is misplaced. They do often go broke after their career. That is sad. It is also completely avoidable with _very_ basic financial planning. I think feeling sorry for them is a disservice, because it makes it seem that this outcome is hard to avoid. It's not hard when they're making 500k+/year:
1. Spend (a lot) less than you make. At 500k/year anywhere in the US, you should easily be saving 200k / year.
2. Invest the money you've saved. There's lots of good advice online, and realistically if you're saving 200k/year you don't have to worry about making the best choices -- just decent ones.
3. Don't accept generic lifestyle creep!
People need to be responsible and take control of their finances. You can't rely on somebody else to watch your finances, or make you eat your vegetables, or brush your teeth. The same advice applies to lots of people in tech, IMO.
But often there are obvious and "easy" answers that are anything but easy for the person who needs those answers.
"Just cheer up, depressed person!"
"Just eat less and exercise more, fat person!"
"Just stop shooting up, heroin addict!"
"Don't accept generic lifestyle creep, pro athlete who's teammates are all living it up like they live in a gangsta rap music video!"
I'm sure there are lots of pro sports players that get and heed advice just like yours, and finish out their short and bright sports career well financially set for their remaining 60-ish years when they're no longer capable of earning half a mil plus a year being athletes.
But I'm also fairly sure the career and lifestyle, and the managers, hangers on, and sycophants they're surrounded with push then hard the other direction.
I'm not from the US, so I don't have a real understanding of US pro sports and the way people end up there, but I have this impression that it's "one of the ways out of the ghetto" for at least some of them. People who won the genetic lottery, but lost the birth demographics lottery. They've never had generation wealth or even a middle class safety net. They don't have family or friends who have experience or advice about what to do with suddenly having way more money that anybody the have even known. They don't have family or close friends who can recommend trusted financial advisors or lawyers. Any advice they're getting risks coming from people they ane not certain they can trust to have their own interests at heart, and aren't trying to skim their own percentage off the top.
I don't exactly pity someone who earns 500k+ a year in a short pro sports career, and blows it all ending up poor. But I think I can understand how the system is set up - if not to actively encourage that outcome, at the very least that system probably doesn't do as much to protect against it as they could.
> "Don't accept generic lifestyle creep, pro athlete who's teammates are all living it up like they live in a gangsta rap music video!"
I'm not sure lifestyle creep is actually the main problem that celebrities going broke suffer from. Stereotypically the lifestyle is something they can afford, but they make bad investments.
Can you expand on that? I feel like it’s the most misused and overused word in my vocabulary and one I wish I could just get rid of a lot of the time and never seem to manage. It just creeps in.
Just in the usage being complained about argues that whatever it is modifying does not need or benefit from analysis.
It just creeps in, but why? Why does it creep in? Often because we do not want to do the complicated analysis as to why things are the way they are because then it does not validate our preferences which are often emotional and not movable by logic anyway.
Just exercise more, fatty, says that the problem of being a fatty has a simple solution that anyone can see and there is no need to argue the point here. Start jogging!!
Just in the rather archaic meaning nowadays as being right and proper and what should happen in a fair and balanced universe is tangentially related, the archaic meaning of Just is memetically echoed in the assertive mode of Just doing things. If the world was fair and balanced and most of all really simple then Just jogging would cure the fatty, but it doesn't.
You are both right. Yes it’s very easy to just eat less or spend less. But it’s also nearly impossible for the obese or the athlete respectively. Because we need to recognize people don’t really have free will to do what they know is best. If we recognized that and acted accordingly then the world would be so much more reasonable to live in.
I think there's an even simpler point that people who make fun of athletes for blowing their paychecks instead of saving them miss:
* These are elite athletes at the top of their pyramid, which means they have an absolutely bonikers elite competitive drive that got them where they had so far.
They were probably the best player on every team they've been since kindergarten. They've made it to the top of the pyramid and most want to keep going. Championships, all-stars, MVPs, all of these are things they are USED to getting at every level so far, and they want to keep going.
So when they sign there $X00,000 rookie deal they're not thinking "OK how do i save the most of this for my retirement", they're thinking "how do i get $Y,000,000 deal next? And the $WZ,000,000 deal after that?" And of course then I'll be set for life, and it will be easy to save and retire cuz i'll be rich.
> Spend (a lot) less than you make. At 500k/year anywhere in the US, you should easily be saving 200k / year.
$500k/year sounds like a lot, but that's enough that taxes are going to take a large bite. Only the biggest stars can get their income deferred beyond their career. Because of the nature of the job, you're going to have larger housing costs: when you get traded, you need to find somewhere to live quickly and you might be on the hook for the old lease for some time; depending on the league, off-season training may happen in a different part of the country than the regular season, so you might need housing there too... Moving costs probably add up, because trades are immediate.
If you're only in the league for 5 years, chances are you're spending some time in the minors and you're typically not earning at your headling contract rate then... Also, a lot of the headline rates include bonuses for winning the championship which statistically few teams and players do.
There's also the problem that yes, these people need financial advice because they don't always have financial skills, but they also have trouble picking financial advisers because they don't always have financial skills.
Also, young people of all income levels get themselves into trouble with finance; higher income probably makes it easier.
I certainly agree that $500k/year for 5 years should leave you well off after, but it's not that surprising that it often doesn't.
I think we’re mostly agreeing, but I feel this is a little misleading:
> $500k/year sounds like a lot, but that's enough that taxes are going to take a large bite.
It seems to imply that taxes are going to make the $500k income life surprisingly hard, but let’s do the math. In California, with $500k income, your effective taxation rate is 41%, looking here: https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#M0SXJ.... So you’re going to take home about $300k after tax!! I think that’s still _so much money_. I would struggle to spend that even if I tried to. Ya, the taxes are higher. But it’s not that big of an issue, once you’re making a ton of money it just doesn’t hurt much. That’s why graduated tax rates are tolerable to begin with, imo.
$300k net and you want them to save $200k. $100k net goes a long way, but they're probably renting at least two places, a lot of eating away from home (much of which I'm sure gets covered by the team, but probably not all of it) a lot of excess transportation. Excess tax prep cause of all the working in multiple jurisdictions, etc. Things will add up; thankfully I have all the coordination of a newspaper so I don't have to deal with the accounting problems ;p
Idk, maybe I’m out of touch, i still think 100k for loving expenses is more than enough. A nice apartment in Mountainview is like $3500-$4000/month. If you have to rent two apartments, presumably you’re not renting both in such an expensive area. I’d think housing can be covered by 60k/year pretty comfortably.
You need a certain kind of personality to be responsible financially, and it doesn't overlap with the personality required of a pop star or sports star.
Quite a few stars get scammed. "Our accountant/manager stole all the money" is not an uncommon thing.
Music and sports both have shady links to organised crime, so it's not a given that stars are going to be surrounded with the kindest and most professional people.
To be a good "team player", it's good to be liked by your teammates. If you want to be friends with your teammates, who all spend money like there's no tomorrow, it probably helps if you do the same.
I'm not saying you can't save up as an athlete, but it's probably harder than we think.
Seems unlikely to me. At that level (minimum salaries in NBA are around $1~3m, depnding on years of experience), even a 10% savings rate could ensure you're never totally "broke." I would find it hard to believe that the difference between spending 100% and 90% could be at all noticeable externally.
>They do often go broke after their career. That is sad. It is also completely avoidable with _very_ basic financial planning. I think feeling sorry for them is a disservice, because it makes it seem that this outcome is hard to avoid. It's not hard when they're making 500k+/year:
this is a good point and also I believe obviously wrong.
What are the stats on people making 500k a year on losing that going broke? Do they outperform sports stars etc.?
If it is the same then that implies that on the average people do not handle 500k basic financial planning well, or two that basic financial planning won't do what you say with that amount of money (for what, 5 years?). At any rate it would mean that generally people suffer this way and thus it is doing a disservice to point out how dumb they were for not doing basic financial planning.
If it is not the same then it implies that there may be something about the career that makes it harder then it does for other people in which case you are doing even more of a disservice.
I believe it is actually there is something about the career that makes it harder (this belief is formed by just thinking about it and doing absolutely no data analysis because I just do not have the time to devote to it past this HN post)
But I think we can create a thought experiment that shows why it is different
Many of us here are familiar with careers the top of which make 500k a year, there are a few engineers who could make that much. Or management at tech firms, it doesn't matter. There are people who can make that much.
Now if you lose your 500k job in tech what happens? You probably fall down a level to a lower paying job in tech. Let's say 390,000. That's a significant drop, but it's still a pretty nice wage.
The reason for this is because the tech career is a pyramid, 500k at or near top. And a pyramid means that the levels lower than the higher levels are wider (this being an analogy) and being wider has more entries for you to fall into.
Sports is also a pyramid. Or really several pyramids. There is the small pyramid of multi-million dollar players who can fall into single millions and then into the hundreds of thousands. But mainly the pyramid you are dealing with is an inverted pyramid. That is to say the sports career chart is top = player, most players, when you fall out of player level you fall into a level with fewer slots - coaches, commentators, agents, recruiters. If you can't fall into one of these slots and perform adequately (perhaps because you are doing a high paying job that also has high risks of causing brain damage [depending on sport obviously]) then when you lose your 500k sports job you are probably significantly worse off than most of us are when we lose our 500k programming jobs (obviously counterexamples abound, like if you lose job due to illness that means you won't get 390000 programming job either)
Anyway I believe your point that these people should not be pitied over much because they could handle their problems with basic financial playing probably is a bit mean, and one I often hear around here.
as it the case with most analogies, the pyramid analogy is severely flawed, but I do think it makes the one point clearly which is that when you loose a 500k programming job there are more lower paying jobs in the same industry you can fall into, when you lose a 500k sports job you might not have a lower paying job you can fall into because there just aren't that many in the sports industry.
It's interesting to observe that fame (and the money that usually comes with it) seems to follow something like a log scale. People usually don't become gradually more famous in a linear way. They're more likely to spend a few years with 50k listeners and then get a big hit and get 1 million listeners overnight, then the next big jump is 20 million, and so on.
It's possible to be semi-famous and still able to go to the grocery store and pump your own gas without getting recognized. The local sports radio guys don't need an entourage, even if they do get recognized. But as a rising artist, you hit a point where you can no longer go out in public at all. It's really shocking when it happens because it's so abrupt. My dad's famous friend was a regular at a local restaurant and wasn't bothered for a long time, even when his name/face started showing up in the media. Then one day another customer shouted his name and he got mobbed by fans, and he realized he couldn't go out to eat like a normal person anymore. I think Charli crossed that line with the success of her album Brat last year. It's the point where you start to ask yourself if it's really worth it, and maybe consider going full recluse like Thomas Pynchon. (That's not even getting into the online stan culture stuff that Charli talks about in the article.)
> I think Charli crossed that line with the success of her album Brat last year.
In Hollywood, that line gets crossed at a surprisingly low level. I am friends with Josh Sussman, who played Jacob Ben Israel on Glee. I occasionally visit him in LA, and we can’t go anywhere in public without getting constantly stopped by people wanting photos. It’s exhausting.
I didn't watch it myself, but Glee was a very popular show. Since Josh Susman was a recurring character, it's unsurprising that he'd have a large fanbase (especially in LA).
In the words of Adam Ant: it took us 3 years to be famous overnight.
I also heard about Matt Lucas, of Little Britain fame. He was slowly plugging away at it, and was about to give up. At around 30 years old, he teamed up with David Walliams, describing it as the last roll of the die. Their popularity exploded.
Morgan Freeman didn't become famous until he was in his 50's. Someone asked him if he was upset that it took so long. His response was: "No, because it didn't have to happen at all."
It's fascinating to me that her new album's name is "Wuthering Heights", the name of Kate Bush's debut and number 1 single from 1978. Kate Bush is well known (in the circles of people who know about this sort of thing) and as fiercely independent and self-controlled artist. I hope Charlii manages her career and fame as well as Kate has over the decades.
As I understand, Charli’s album is the soundtrack to a movie called Wuthering Heights. Which is loosely based on the 19th century novel of the same name. And that novel was also the inspiration for the Kate Bush song.
The "average" player in one of those sports leagues isn't really a celebrity at the level the article is talking about. Charli XCX's last album was nominated for 11 Grammies and won six of them, and it has the 15th highest aggregate rating from Metacritic of all time. If you're comparing to athletes, this is All-Star roster, potential MVP winning-level performance for at least that season. By no means it's every player who hits 50 home runs in a season is going to be set for life financially, but the chances they're going to struggle are a lot lower than some some random utility infielder or middle reliever.
never heard of them before this HN article lol. the only thing that struck me was no paragraphs in the article, just one giant wall of text. and also how bored id be living that lifestyle (personally)
I was aware of her name, and roughly her genre, but couldn't have named or even recognised a single track of hers.
I looked her up and started listening as I read the article, and the while listening to the two track released so far from her upcoming album I was thinking "this is really good, why haven't I listened to her before?" then I put on her last album Brat, and realised "Oh, right. That's not my style of music. She's never been writing for me, and I know who she is writing for, and I understand why they like her and why she's so popular." And I respect that.
I'll keep an ear out for her new album, and based on what I've heard so far I fully expect to enjoy it, way more than I'm enjoying Brat. I've also added her substack to my rss feeds, no guarantee it'll stay there long term, but I'm at least curious enough to follow along for her next few blogposts.
And there are plenty of people who haven't heard of Aaron Judge or Steph Curry. That doesn't change the fact that they've played at an entirely different level than the overwhelming majority of other athletes playing their sport.
My point wasn't that everyone will recognize them, just that there's a pretty clear difference between the most successful few at the top of their domain and the others who might still be able to make a living doing it but aren't superstar-level compared to their peers, and that's independent of whether every single person knows who they are. The parent comment brought to the idea of average players of the major professional sports leagues, and I felt like that was almost missing the context of this article, which is someone who might be the literally have been the most successful artist of last year, not just an average a professional musician.
I would bet you have encountered a much larger catalog of Charli tracks than you might think. I too was in the same position last year. Then I looked her up and she has actually produced like 30% of the songs played in Urban hat shops, in public places that allow swimming, and in office buildings in the hvac-safe entrance zone between the first and second set of automatic doors.
That just sounds like you're saying the "average" person in all those professions are bad at personal finance. Maybe that's a reflection of society at large. One articles estimates 90% of Americans being in debt[1] so it wouldn't surprise me that this successful subset would fare much better (although I would bet they do when compared to the general population).
Also debt isn't always bad, but most individuals quoted in the study are probably not holding the good type of debt (debt one can easily pay off but doesn't).
> That just sounds like you're saying the "average" person in all those professions are bad at personal finance. Maybe that's a reflection of society at large.
It is, but it's also a reflection of the business of professional sports in America and where most professional athletes come from. Most professional athletes don't come out of a positive financial environment, they mostly come from poor upbringings and neither through family or the education system are they taught basic financial literacy. Professional athletes in the US suffer the same exact problems as lottery winners, for pretty much exactly the same reason.
> Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse.
They would also have been broke if they hadn't been athletes. The career doesn't damage their finances. It's excellent for their finances while it lasts, and then they revert to normal. Why would you call that a curse?
In no particular order, and please keep in mind this is off the top of my head:
* Influence (the classic)
* YC videos (e.g. https://youtu.be/0fKYVl12VTA?si=I9uylXSRyOf1nXRv, https://youtu.be/DH7REvnQ1y4?si=Ke858PmaaBr5ar-e, https://youtu.be/hyYCn_kAngI?si=sO_co6kbDaNn3cql, etc)
* Thinking Fast and Slow
* Purple Cow
* Clayton Christensen stuff
* Spin Selling
* Challenger Sale
* Guerrilla marketing (for the mental muscle)
* Jeffrey Gitomer (basic but useful)
* Lean Startup (for positioning)
* Charisma Myth
* Minimalist Entrepreneur (bits and pieces)
* The presentation secrets of steve jobs (just a good book on presentations, framed around Steve Jobs to sell more)
For what its worth this question comes up fairly often. It seems like technical people would like a "technical people" guide on how to do Sales and marketing. Does that sound useful to anyone?