Mean People Fail (2014)

I wish this was true. Yet, I think we all have some skin in the game to why this article rings false.

When it comes to getting an advantage, people often look the other way at meanness.

For example, it’s easy to complain about how Amazon treats their employees. Yet, we choose to buy from Amazon because it’s convenient, cheap, and everyone else is doing it.

We might see an organization treat someone else unfairly but when resources are scarce, we often look the other way because it feels like there is nothing one person can do.

I like the old black and white movie, The Invisible Man, to demonstrate the situation of a specific type of meanness that seems ever present today. The enemy is invisible and is only defeated when the entire community gets involved.

This works great in an orderly society, where most of the really mean stuff has already been successfully disincentivized, often at great cost. Out in the jungle, it takes dozens to hundreds of years to grow a tree, but only a few minutes to cut it down.

If the successful people you meet in real life are nice and you see lots of meanness on the internet, it probably just means that anonymity causes meanness.

Everyone talking about this being out of touch with the present and how figures in proximity to Graham don’t fit the description of nice he’s referring to should think about this passage:

> For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.

> That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.

What’s changed?

Edit:

The paragraph after should be included also, I think

He’s saying growth mindsets “win” and zero-sum players, the mean ones, stagnate. This is true as a system— who wants to invest with someone intent on gouging you— and it’s true as a function of effort— if you spend your time on petty tricks and tactics, you will, in the long run, “grow” very little.

Sadly, even if accurate, the exceptions (i.e. mean people who get power) can have an outsized impact because they don't respect norms and boundaries that prevent the worst abuses.

Also some strategies I'd call "mean" can be very effective: predatory pricing, monopolization, regulatory capture, disregarding externalities, lying, fraud, etc.

A velvet glove conceals the iron fist.

It may be that successful mean people just hide it well enough to seem nice and the "x-ray vision" of the author's wife doesn't work on everyone. Once a mean person's position is unassailable, the velvet gloves come off. Alternatively, money is power and power corrupts.

The current crop of billionaires are at the pinnacle of success (depending on how you define it), but most sure don't seem very nice, and that's with a large PR team working overtime to hide the meanness.

All people fail. We have examples on both sides of the spectrum. Let's not cherry pick.

At his best. (And I don't mean business or politics per se but as a philosophical take to life.)

I like Paul Graham a lot but this is simply not true.

Look at the most successful people of recent times and you will quickly see a consistent pattern of meanness when you dig into how they work with others: - Steve Jobs - Bill Gates - Elon Musk - Sam Altman - Etc.

They don't really. You have to hide the meanness on occasion to get ahead, sure.

I don't like the implication that all rich people (which is Graham's criterion for success) are nice. Didn't Musk and Thiel read drafts of his later essays?

Ruthless and diplomatic (where it matters) gets you ahead. Ruthlessness is often indistinguishable from meanness.

Is lying mean? You need to lie a lot to get ahead,

> It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few.

*mean to Paul Graham. I’ve worked with a lot of mean people in important positions in my career, and they all have a kind, charismatic side when they need to. Those same people are awful to subordinates or people that can’t do something for them. Paul is high value to many people, so they treat him well.

People like Graham who aren’t often in positions where they’re taken advantage of or humbled like to pretend they and their peers are magnanimous and kind but often enough they’re just not exposed to the forces that make people ugly. All other things being equal: it’s often lack of agency over work and over their own lives—this shows up in work where people are given lots of responsibility but without the freedom to fulfill it.

I often find it concerning how elementary a lot of well off tech peoples’ theory of mind is. People are not acausal personalities, they are functions of their internals and their environments. A person mean at a stressful job might be delightful at a party after.

So when will Trump fail?

This claim seems true largely because we cherry pick examples and because this is how we feel the world ought to work. Announcing this belief is just a way of signalling prosocial stance, a nostalgic mid-10s catechism to us all just getting along.

Its the 2020s and mean is doing numbers.

> It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few.

Does Paul know Musk, Bezos, Trump, Thiel, etc., etc.?

It feels like this didn't age well. An optimistic product of its time. But perhaps it's a question of time horizon. Mean people eventually fail, but it's the political version of the saying, the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Or perhaps "don't be mean" primarily applies to the "little people".

This sounds like one of my former bosses' speeches! He's a nasty man, of course. He's stupid, too. Now I'm his partner. I suppose that makes me mean, too. And even more stupid. Is the detail about his wife symptomatic? My friend often says the same thing about his wife. I've tried a couple of times to tell him that it's not a good idea to 'vibe' people's intentions and that he's confusing loyalty with goodness. Like the Politburo. I'm trying to convince him that it would be more democratic and environmentally friendly to assume that everyone is mean and stupid.

> Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight.

> Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them. They can hire people who will put up with them because they need a job. But the best people have other options. A mean person can't convince the best people to work for him unless he is super convincing. And while having the best people helps any organization, it's critical for startups.

This is just lame, self-serving rationale. One of the most vapid arguments I read in recent memory.

It's the sort of rationale that results in "good people are successful, therefore successful people are good".

Winning quite often has nothing to do with being good or mean, and only with being related to the correct people and having access to more money. This, paired with the fact that most people with a lot of money are all sociopaths does not paint a very rosy "mean people fail" bullshit.

Yet sociopaths are successful and run this industry.

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