XOXO Festival
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2015–2024
21:40 · 82K views · Oct 21, 2014
Darius Kazemi's XOXO 2014 talk on releasing 72 weird internet side projects in a year. Framed as 'How I Won the Lottery,' it argues that success needs both luck and buying many tickets.
HN uses it as the favorite antidote to survivorship-bias success stories, arguing that trying many cheap things raises your odds.
10 comments from Hacker News
This reminds me of one of my favorite talks of all time[1]. Applied to careers, I take the talk as implying that trying things is the secret. After a certain level of experience in your career, you'll know whether you like it. Branching off of that, it might even be the right thing to do to find a new career. One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received is "successful people do stuff. It doesn't matter what that stuff is, just do stuff and you'll eventually be successful". Some people will be luckier than others, and be successful at their stuff at a higher ratio, but overall, the ratio is about the same, and you just need to keep doing stuff. Also, one of my favorite illustrations/cartoons of all time[2] speaks to this point. Basically, if you pursue the same career for your entire life, you're probably wasting your time. once you have your x,000 hours of work in, do something new where you can cross-apply that knowledge into domains that need it. [1] this video [2] [LINK] Edit: sloppy link formatting
I'm surprised I don't see a reference yet to Darius Kazemi's iconic 2014[1] talk, which is basically riffing on this joke for 10 minutes: this video A key takeaway I've kept with me this whole time is the idea of there being two kinds of creative advice: (1) how to buy more lottery tickets, and (2) how to win the lottery. The former is useful, the latter not so much. [1] Wait, 9 years ago? That can't be right.
This falls under the category of "how I won the lottery" vs. "how to buy tickets". The former isn't useful, the latter is. You can see an excellent talk about the difference here: this video
Darius Kazemi - "How I Won the Lottery" - a talk at XOXO Festival (2014) this video brutally hilarious
Darius Kazemi did a talk on a similar idea. this video Kazemi is more of an programmer-artist or -comedian, but he releases dozens of side projects a year, all relatively low effort. He uses himself as a test case and also examines KickStarters and how unpredictable their success is.