【人物】Paul Graham: 卑鄙的人一定失败

最近我一直在思考，俗话说无奸不商，可为什么现在成功者中少有卑鄙的呢？当然也有例外，但是非常少。

卑鄙的人可不是少数。实际上，是互联网让我们了解到一个人能够卑鄙到什么程度。过去只有名人和专家才能掌握舆论，现在互联网给了每个人传播的渠道，我们这才能看到那些过去被隐藏在长尾中的卑劣的人和事。

尽管卑鄙的人很多，但是成功者里鲜有存在，难道说，卑鄙和成功是互斥的吗？

我的这种判断，或许因为我视角的偏差。因为我只认识创业者、程序员、教授这些类型的人。我倒挺相信其他领域的成功者是手段卑鄙的，比如我总觉得那些对冲基金经理肯定是奸诈狡猾的，但我不了解这个领域，所以无法做出判断。又比如，那些大毒枭给人感觉都是手段极其残忍的。但是最少世界上还有很大一部分净土，在那里，卑鄙的人不会成功，而且这部分领土正在扩大。

我妻子，同时也是 YC 的创始人 Jessica，她有着能像 X 光扫描一样洞察他人品行的特异功能，娶她回家就像娶了一台机场的安检仪一样。她从投资银行进入到创业领域，一路走来她也同样注意到这样一个现象，那就是：

品行好的创业者总是能取得成功，而人品卑劣的人创业总是失败。

这是为何呢？我觉得有以下几个原因。第一，卑鄙的行为让你变得愚蠢。这是我痛恨竞争的原因。在竞争中，你没办法发挥到最好。因为竞争不具有一般性，在竞争中获胜，需要考虑天时地利，还有人为的因素。取得胜利往往不是通过更好的去思考，而是通过一些在某些特定情形适用的伎俩。竞争和解决真实问题同样费脑子，对于那些珍惜自己脑细胞的人来说，这是一件非常痛苦的事情，就好像汽车轮子一直打滑，你的大脑飞速运转着但是却什么实质性工作都没做。

创业公司不是通过攻击对手来获胜的，他们取胜的方式是超越对手。当然也有例外，但通常创业者成功的方式是跑在前头，而不是停下来和对手干架。

耍手段的创业者会失败的另一个原因，是他们招不到最优秀的人为他们工作。确实有人能够忍受和他们一起工作，因为他们确实需要一份工作。但是最优秀的人会有其他的选择。一个卑鄙的人无法说服最好的人才为他工作，除非这人非常善于游说。而团队成员的质量对创业公司又至关重要。

第三个原因，仁爱的精神同时也是他们前进的辅动力。如果你想做伟大的事情，驱动你的通常是一种仁义的精神。

最富有的创业者他们最想要的不是钱，被金钱驱使的创业者通常会在面临高价收购时，选择把公司卖掉。那些还继续坚持的创业者，他们内心有着比金钱更高的向往。

虽然他们可能不会经常挂在嘴边，但是他们一直在努力改善这个世界。这意味着仁义的内心是一种天然的优势。

更让人激动的是，人品和成功挂钩的游戏规则，不是仅仅适用在创业领域，一个崭新的未来正在到来。

历史中，大部分的成功意味着掌控稀缺资源，获得它需要经过激烈的争夺。游牧民族通过侵略把食物采集者赶往贫瘠的土地，镀金时代的金融家通过激烈角逐来实现铁路垄断。过去，要想成功，就得赢得零和博弈（zero-sum games），把别人的抢过来，变成自己的。这种情况下，卑鄙不仅不是成功的障碍，反而成为了一种优势。

但是现在时代变了，没有你死我活，获得成功也不再是通过抢夺稀缺资源，而是通过创新和创造。

事实上，创新驱动成功的游戏规则早就存在了。在公元前三世纪，阿基米德的成功法则就是通过不断的创新，至少在他被闯进来的罗马士兵杀死之前。这也说明，以创新为驱动力的社会生存法则，需要社会秩序达到了一定的高度。这不仅仅是说没有战争而已，还包括避免 19 世纪的巨头之间的经济暴力，要能够营造出一种安全感，我的创新不会被随意窃取。

创造力在过去一直是思想家们的生存法则，他们是在浪潮之巅的人。你如果回想一下历史上那些不是依靠残忍手段获取成功的人，你首先会想到数学家，作者和艺术家。现在，知识分子的游戏规则已经开始渗透到了更广大的真实世界中，正在逐渐扭转过去成功和道德的历史性对立关系。这是多么振奋人心的时代！

我和夫人一直教育我们的孩子要做一个好人，我们可以忍受着噪音，拥挤，垃圾食品，但是我们不能忍受卑劣的人品。现在我教育孩子的时候又多了一套说词：卑鄙的人不会成功!

Paul Graham & Jassica Livingston

原文：Mean People Fail

－November 2014

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

Meanness isn't rare. In fact, one of the things the internet has shown us is how mean people can be. A few decades ago, only famous people and professional writers got to publish their opinions. Now everyone can, and we can all see the long tail of meanness that had previously been hidden.

And yet while there are clearly a lot of mean people out there, there are next to none among the most successful people I know. What's going on here? Are meanness and success inversely correlated?

Part of what's going on, of course, is selection bias. I only know people who work in certain fields: startup founders, programmers, professors. I'm willing to believe that successful people in other fields are mean. Maybe successful hedge fund managers are mean; I don't know enough to say. It seems quite likely that most successful drug lords are mean. But there are at least big chunks of the world that mean people don't rule, and that territory seems to be growing.

My wife and Y Combinator cofounder Jessica is one of those rare people who have x-ray vision for character. Being married to her is like standing next to an airport baggage scanner. She came to the startup world from investment banking, she has always been struck both by how consistently successful startup founders turn out to be good people, and how consistently bad people fail as startup founders.

Why? I think there are several reasons. One is that being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems. Which is particularly painful to someone who cares how their brain is used: your brain goes fast but you get nowhere, like a car spinning its wheels.

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.

There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to build great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence. The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money. The ones driven by money take the big acquisition offer that nearly every successful startup gets en route. The ones who keep going are driven by something else. They may not say so explicitly, but they're usually trying to improve the world. Which means people with a desire to improve the world have a natural advantage.

The exciting thing is that startups are not just one random type of work in which meanness and success are inversely correlated. This kind of work is the future.

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.

There have long been games where you won by having new ideas. In the third century BC Archimedes won by doing that. At least until an invading Roman army killed him. Which illustrates why this change is happening: for new ideas to matter, you need a certain degree of civil order. And not just not being at war. You also need to prevent the sort of economic violence that nineteenth century magnates practiced against one another and communist countries practiced against their citizens. People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen.

That has always been the case for thinkers, which is why this trend began with them. When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. The exciting thing is that their m.o. seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, and this is reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between meanness and success.

So I'm really glad I stopped to think about this. Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean. We tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not meanness. And now I have both an additional reason to crack down on it, and an additional argument to use when I do: that being mean makes you fail.

－ 本文来自Paul Graham博客，译文来自36Kr

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