<story><title>You Are the Exception to the Rule</title><url>https://zapier.com/blog/2012/06/17/you-are-exception-rule/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>apl</author><text>This type of saccharine feel-good prose irritates to no end. No, chances are you&apos;re not the exception to the rule of mediocrity; that&apos;s just a matter of statistics. Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won&apos;t make things better.&lt;p&gt;Entrepeneurs fail every day. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Don&apos;t fall for the cheap words of encouragement.&lt;p&gt;[ADDENDUM: I still don&apos;t trust the &quot;Most coders can&apos;t do FizzBuzz&quot; meme that generally accompanies the flowery you&apos;re-a-special-snowflake-talk. Applicants maybe, but that doesn&apos;t say much. There&apos;s tons of decent programmers out there, and 99% of them won&apos;t get famous or found a sustainable business.]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cushman</author><text>Conversely, I see zero value in this kind of reactionarily pessimistic you&apos;re-average-at-everything-and-even-if-you&apos;re-good-you&apos;ll-probably-fail-anyway stuff that always turns up on any encouraging article.&lt;p&gt;You get zero points for being able to say &quot;See, I was right&quot; when someone fails. Completely aside from that, it&apos;s factually wrong; people on this site are quite likely to have skills and resources that the average person cannot &lt;i&gt;comprehend&lt;/i&gt;. Being a &quot;decent programmer&quot; is a fabulously valuable skill in the modern world. You aren&apos;t guaranteed to be able to leverage it into capital right away, but if you work hard and get out of your own head it&apos;s fully achievable.</text></comment>
<story><title>You Are the Exception to the Rule</title><url>https://zapier.com/blog/2012/06/17/you-are-exception-rule/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>apl</author><text>This type of saccharine feel-good prose irritates to no end. No, chances are you&apos;re not the exception to the rule of mediocrity; that&apos;s just a matter of statistics. Believing so in absence of hard evidence to the contrary is delusional and won&apos;t make things better.&lt;p&gt;Entrepeneurs fail every day. Hundreds, maybe thousands. Don&apos;t fall for the cheap words of encouragement.&lt;p&gt;[ADDENDUM: I still don&apos;t trust the &quot;Most coders can&apos;t do FizzBuzz&quot; meme that generally accompanies the flowery you&apos;re-a-special-snowflake-talk. Applicants maybe, but that doesn&apos;t say much. There&apos;s tons of decent programmers out there, and 99% of them won&apos;t get famous or found a sustainable business.]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lotharbot</author><text>Think about what you spend money on, and the people behind it.  They might be making your lunch, bagging your groceries, or mowing your lawn.  They are probably mediocre at it, but you pay them anyway.&lt;p&gt;Others will pay you decent money to do a mediocre job, and good money to do a good job, because you are the exception to the rule of &lt;i&gt;being willing and able to do the thing for them at all&lt;/i&gt;.  Most people who have problem X would rather pay money for you to solve some problem for them (even if your solution is mediocre) than solve it themselves, because that allows them to focus on solving whatever problem they care about or think they can get paid for.</text></comment>