Just to be clear I’m not forming any trails at all right now, and this isn’t about me. I tried in the past for a decade (starting companies) but realized I wasn’t good enough to be near the top
So far I’ve found what I said to be true in both research and companies
Conversation
Also it mostly sucks, practically everyone I know that’s forming their own trail from scratch (in science or companies) is pretty miserable (N = a few hundred?)
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One example of the difference: lots of 5-10th employees of a company convince themselves it’s sort of like being a founder but not quite, I don’t know a single founder (of say a >100mm company) that thinks that back
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I’ve also seen the discrepancy when someone joins a research direction and convince themselves they “basically founded that research direction”, but it’s usually not mirrored
I think in both cases it reflects true differences in the roles rather than just an ego thing
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Not actually saying one is better by the way. Right now I have no desire to be a founder or start a totally novel research direction or anything like that. All I’m saying is that it’s very qualitatively different than going down even a slightly worn path
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I do think you learn a lot more what it’s like to start a trail if you’re close to someone who did though! If I could redo my entrepreneurship path I’d try to get close to someone great by being an early employee watch them for a ~3y, then try myself if I still wanted to
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Ironically I did this explicitly at 19 as the first eng of a company that went public recently but changed my mind and left before my cliff partially to keep doing founder stuff. If I’d just stayed I’d have made 100x+ the money I did (where I did well enough)
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Anyway, I change my mind back. Not just because that company went vertical but because I think the overall strategy of learn from someone really good was right and better than the strategy I pivoted to
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the “just” there wasn’t meant as regret and shaming myself for not staying, more that it that job was incredibly easy compared to the less fruitful path I took. It probably would have been a 95% reduction in pain/difficulty (which partly I was attracted to)
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Although I do think a default strategy of “do the harder thing” is a good one. I spent a few months reading deathbed interviews and no one regrets the things they did do, they regret the things they didn’t do
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Replying to
I wonder if this cleaves cleanly if you frame it terms of terminal values. I *think* the happiest people pick goals that they really care about, no matter how hard, then find the easiest possible way to achieve those (vs. doing the hard thing for the sake of doing hard things).