Hasnain says:

I had the honor of working with Yann very briefly on a couple of small bugfixes, and always was awed by his genius insights in creating lz4 and then ztsd. Didn’t know about the inspirational story behind it. (And can’t wait for the next gen successor to be fully released).

“Adam: This is the wildest story I’ve ever heard in terms of impact. A marketing professional, a project manager, a couple evenings a week after he bikes home from his job in Paris, starts tweaking a calculator game. And by the end of it, Yann has shifted a whole industry’s approach to data compression and saved billions and billions of dollars.

So the obvious question I have for Yann is how? How can you have that much impact in your career? In your hobby?

Yann: I would say the first advice here is don’t do that for the success. Success is too random and too far away. If someone targets success, it will lose stamina way before reaching that point. So do something because you like it. That’s the inner force that will drive you beyond I would say the normal investment that almost everybody can also do. And I think that’s very important one. So now if you are interested in a domain, keep going at it. And it’s really a small effort regularly in the same direction that brings you very far. I understood that from my mother”

Posted on 2023-05-15T05:32:05+0000