{"id":510,"date":"2015-06-07T01:08:21","date_gmt":"2015-06-07T01:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seanvwork.com\/blog\/?p=510"},"modified":"2024-05-21T00:31:56","modified_gmt":"2024-05-21T00:31:56","slug":"the-hacker-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seanvwork.com\/blog\/the-hacker-myth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Myth Of The Successful Lone-Wolf Startup Hacker"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"coding<\/a><\/p>\n

Dudes, well certain nerdy dudes, love to romanticize about secretly coding throughout the night, and becoming the next soloprenuer success story. I’ve been there. I know plenty of others who have too…
\n<\/p>\n

I have a friend that’s incredibly brilliant. Self taught developer. He’s been creating all kinds of amazing “web stuff” since the early 2000s. He always has ideas for businesses and startups. But he suffers from one gnarly affliction:<\/p>\n

Procrastination<\/b><\/p>\n

He told me the other day, “I’m addicted to procrastinating. Seriously. I have an addiction.”<\/p>\n

At first, I was like “WTF are you talking about? You can’t have an addiction to procrastination.” But as he delved further into his issues, I found out that he certainly had a big problem.<\/p>\n

He just can’t stick with something and knock out his goals. He’d rather stay in bed all day.<\/p>\n

But then it hit me. He’s always working alone<\/b>. He’s always working by himself. He goes out and parties a lot. He’s very social. It’s just that his work life is completely lonely<\/i>. And that’s the problem.<\/p>\n

1. Humans Are Social Animals<\/h2>\n

I had the same problem back in 2010. I was running a consulting shop all by myself. And I would spend hours in a 2-room office all by my lonesome. It may seem not that strange at first, but it quickly becomes something like solitary confinement. It starts to really get depressing after a few months. The good news was I lost a bunch of weight, but my life was just…weird. That’s actually a big part of the reason why I joined KISSmetrics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But back to the evolutionary point I was making.<\/p>\n

Humans are social animals. We evolved to work in tribes and now teams. That’s how we solve problems. We do it together.<\/p>\n

When we were trying to chase down wild game it would get tricky. The animals we would hunt would dart off in all directions and we would spend hours trying to chase them down with spears. But as the tribe started working together, we would make plans to split up and chase game into our “surprise gang”. And the surprise trap would work! And we would feast that night. We learned teamwork.<\/p>\n