Encourage others to take impossible risks.
Theire failure and corpses build a bridge to your success.
Try to see obnoxious "You-can-do-it-talks" not as ego-pumping, but as leveraging of stupid people into free R&D.
Do not be first, find others who are stupid enough to develop and research for you- invest just enough, to become a goto adress once they are desperat- skin the carcasses.
Be the general in the fifth row of the army, who will be painted as victorious, while all those "inspired" men, are laying dead and dieing at his horses feet.
Some people have bad motivations, but that is not true for everyone saying these things.
I had no choice, I couldn't do anything but start a business, I was a failure as an employee because of how I looked at life and the process of building/creating. I was always at odds with my employers to make things work better. (I was told to work slower and less hard because I made others look bad sigh)
So what do you say to someone like me? I need to hear "you can do it" because even though I am inclined to do it anyways, it's still really hard to build your own business.
This kind of information is incredibly helpful (encouraging) for me in my situation at this point in time. For many others it's not good advice.
we are all born lacking all the things that we currently possess. just because you don't have something right now doesn't mean you can't develop and cultivate it over time. all it takes is being willing to grind and even suffer a little bit if necessary to develop it. i have the same problem myself but im at a crossroads in my life where i just can't sit around being upset with myself for not having the skills and such that i desperately need to live a functional and fulfilling life, so i understand the difficulty. you're not alone. just know that you can do it if you keep on keeping on, i believe in you!
- With a goal of supporting your health and personal needs
- An exercise of your own judgement, where your decisions were based on your own huristics for evaluating reality?
When you looked at something and thought "this is, based on my genuine judgement, impossible" did you decide to do something else? Or did you say "I have strong evidence that this cannot possibly work, and I'm really sleep-deprived... but sleep is for the weak and impossible is nothing." and plow onwards relentlessly?
If the former: great!
If the latter: Thats the problem that I think DayDollar is talking about. It is a pattern that I fell into at MIT -- I took on more commitments than was possible to grow into with the skills I knew how to gain because "impossible is nothing". I was constantly drunk-with-fatigue. I looked for help learning how to write first drafts and got told "just do it!" so I spent hours digging my nails into my skin in front of a blank page. I didn't know how to "do it" but the answer was too obvious for anyone to believe me. I asked for help learning how to manage my time and manage writing. Instead, I got encouragement.
The problem with giving advice like "you can do it!" or "start before you think you're ready!" is not that it is wrong. The problem is that it does not assess the situation. Bad advice is a zero-argument function.
Good advice recognizes that you are the source of observations about your situation and gives you a tool to do that better. Good advice offers heuristics: fallible methods of solving a problem which rely on human judgement.
The author of this piece quotes author David McCullough:
> There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing.
Good advice would be a question to ask to guide someone to realize when they've hit that point.
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The comment below me by /u/throwaway35784 tells you to do a whole bunch of things and the only thing it asks you to observe about your current situation is "Find a problem you have."
Everything else that he says is advice that is often a good idea but depends on the situation.
I think we completely agree on what good advice is, and I think I see where I was missing something before.
"You can do it" is not advice per se, it's encouragement.
If I am already doing it, or I intend to, or I am trying to or failing, or I am about to quit or not start, "you can do it" helps me not lose hope. It's not technical or directional, it's uplifting. "Someone cares" can be enough to turn my day around when I am on the knife's edge of success and failure. Then I can do what I already know needs to be done. Thanks for your views on how to give good advice, I think they are quite useful.
"An exercice of your own judgement [...]" Very interesting point. It's a very pragmatic way to test your perception and your judgement on so many level.
You couldn't pay me enough to have a boring 9-5 job where you clock in every day and do the same thing for 20 years that you're not really that great at. Some people have a built in character for taking these kinds of risks. I actively turn down investment money to fight my away from lifestyles that you have described. Everybody dies, even the guy safe in his treehouse, next to the water cooler from a heart attack built up of years of pointless stress worrying over someone else's dream.
So I'm an entrepreneur and I think this is a negative and unhealthy attitude. It also just doesn't make sense. If you're an entrepreneur, is everyone that helps you build your company a loser?
It comes down to risk tolerance. Some people can tolerate more risk and desire more automony. For me, I view my company as a combination of many dreams. I don't make all the decisions or come up with all of the ideas. I actually find encouraging autonomy and mastery, my employees are more productive and happier.
It also seems wrong to morally judge people for living a life they want to live. For too many people simply having a stable job is a dream.
You can't escape judgement, as the parent post shows in his own judgement of other's risk taking behaviour. Some people think it's an 'impossible risk' some people thinks it gives life, a difference of values. The risk is a side thing. The focus is on creating what has value in my world view and somebody else's dream is not it.
I don't make any bones for or against a moral 'argument' in terms of other peoples lives, just a stalwart defense of my own and others like it. I don't think any boss gets far hobbling their employees in any capacity. I have a great respect for the work people do and getting in their way is a waste of everybody's time. For those that dream of a stable job I would encourage them to dream bigger, if they are focused on work and not on some social or personal journey in life.
If everybody was aiming at the same thing I did and valued the same things I did, then yeah they would be losers for copping out on what they want. But not everyone is me and I barely have an opinion beyond passing interest about people who live with different values and goals, but are happy to see them succeed. A rising tide lifts all boats.
> Do not be first, find others who are stupid enough to develop and research for you- invest just enough, to become a goto adress once they are desperat- skin the carcasses.
This strategy has an actual MBA term--it's called the "fast follower".
Basically, the first guy proves the market and takes all the arrows. The second guy reaps the vast majority of the profit in the space.
It's why semiconductor companies are so stagnant, for example, and simply buy each other rather than generate genuinely new, interesting products.
Lol this way you will never start because guess what when 4 people ahead of you die, you will just turn back. You are not good to walk on their corpse. Imo this is totally wrong way of doing anything.
Sounds like a depressing fantasy painted as brutal reality. Maybe an enticing belief for those of us here who are also depressed, but just a fantasy nonetheless.
Similarly, try to convince people that competition is inherently unfair, and that it shouldn’t exist. They will either become apathetic or invest their effort into trying to undermine competition itself, making it far easier on everybody else who’s focused on competing.
> Dude, sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something.
--- Jake the Dog [1]
Maybe not exactly on-topic, but ever since I heard this quote it's been my mantra whenever I'm learning something new. For example I took a beginner's hip hop dancing class last night. A younger me would have been very embarrassed at how uncoordinated I was. That embarrassment probably would have kept me from going back to the class. That mantra helps me remember that it's natural to be bad at first, and you simply have to be at peace with the fact that you're going to suck for a while if you're ever going to actually build the skill.
Somewhere in my career I realized this as well and it has been incredibly helpful.
I call it "embrace the suckiness". When faced with a problem that seems impossible because you lack so much knowledge you are just going to have to accept that you suck for a little while. You have to stay calm and break the problem down into smaller problems and start trying the most retarded things you can think of. Sure, you'll struggle. And yes, half of what you try is going to be worthless, but you're acquiring knowledge and understanding at every step. Eventually it'll all make sense. You have to stay confident that there's light at the end of the tunnel. Solving tough problems and learning new things is all about persistence.
I can't express how important this mindset is for me. It's so statisfying to know that I can handle any problem thrown at me and I won't freak out or me give up. I just keep sucking until I don't.
It's exceptionally hard to start when the end results (i.e. other more experienced people) are so graceful or impressive. It makes the beginning seem like such a farce. Like going to the gym and deadlifting an empty bar beside someone pulling 5 or 6 hundred pounds off the floor.
Congrats on taking the first class! I forced myself to do something similar after a nasty breakup, and the first 4-6 classes were brutal. Then I finally got the hang of it!
I’ve also been thinking about this a lot lately as I play piano more consistently. When I first learn a song it’s agony. I’m straining my brain so hard to figure out a reasonable fingering. The first week or two (assuming practice every day) is likewise quite tough or draining. And then muscle memory kicks in and I’m amazed that I’m able to play the song faster than expected. I feel like this process is way more applicable to learning in general than I used to give it credit. For some reason piano just makes the entire process crystal clear.
Learning is such an incredibly interesting topic for me. The concept behind something like machine learning is easy enough to understand- especially since you can implement everything by yourself and know exactly how it works. 'Human learning' is just so spectacularly abstracted from these models that it leaves me wondering how the heck we actually learn anything. Some examples like your piano playing and muscle memory are some of the more straightforward ones, where we figure something out like 'oh, this section is easier to play with this fingering'. But, like, you're not consciously drawing on all your previous conversations whenever you talk with someone and you don't think 'that conversation went well, time to add this to my corpus of conversations and retrain my "how to speak" module.'
I think it's beautiful that we'll never figure out exactly how learning works.
So I've seen this advice before and I do see it's value, but it doesn't quite work for me.
I know that sucking when you're new at something is expected and merely a step towards the goal, but that doesn't stop me from still feeling inadequate.
The knowing/feeling dichotomy is something I struggle a lot with, and I haven't quite found the solution to that yet.
IMO one of the super important things is not struggling with your feelings. Feeling inadequate is a natural process in sucking. It's a self-defense thing to keep your standing in the socially competitive atmosphere of human social dynamics. It's telling you that you look silly and you're taking a risk in doing this.
And that's okay! It's part of it. Comfort yourself with other things while you do the difficult thing of leaning new skills. That's sort of the whole process of self improvement.
The question is prepare more vs take a shot. Rules of thumb advocating one versus the other are abound. Sun Tzu extols the virtue of more preparation to defeat the enemy before engaging, while also recommending the warrior that does not load his supply wagons twice nor wait for a second group of reinforcements. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, Faint heart never won fair lady etc.
So there is advice advocating both, what to do?
I find that when you have an endeavor with several essential areas, example with a triathlon you need to swim bike and run to complete it. Similarly for a business you need a product-service and you need customers to sell it to etc. Then the best approach is to get your toe wet in each area to get a feel for what is involved. So a mistaken approach is to spend all your time building a product that you think is good enough before starting to talk to customers. You need parallel efforts so that you can determine the right ratio of effort in each area to succeed. In war you would prepare your army but you would also have a few guys harassing the enemy to feel them out...
It depends on what are the consequences for failure. In war, lack of preparation means death of your men at minimum, and the collapse of your nation at worst. In training, failure makes you stronger.
It's a good argument for managers to create a working environment where employees are not afraid to fail. I absolutely agree that starting early is the best and fastest way to learn. Too many people avoid it because of the negative consequences for making mistakes.
> In war, lack of preparation means death of your men at minimum, and the collapse of your nation at worst.
This is the fallacy that keeps people locked in over preparing. The way past it is to identify less risky goals that are still aligned with that particular objective. So in war your objective is to learn the enemy's weaknesses. So you could try trading with them, to survey their defenses. Imagine the Vikings at Lindisfarne, they are not going to go in blind. They first build a trading relationship, selling fish, and as friends they can see how strong the Abbey is, how many monasterial guards there are, or when the collection trays are the most full etc. Very little risk right? Similarly with sales, where your risk is your reputation. Say, you can't afford to jeopardize it with your one big connection because you spent a decade building the relationship. Well then you go in asking for advice on your idea, something low risk, instead of trying to make a yes-no sale.
(Over) Preparing in the context of war or business is where you keep working without engaging the enemy or the customer. The classic problem in startups, which i’ve been through myself, is where you keep working on making your product without developing your market. If you are doing sales interviews in a startup without a product yet, then you are engaging with the customer, and by coordinating with your product team, you will reduce the problem of over building the product. You need to partition the problem space (the goal space, the overall objective space) in terms of the separate essential pieces that need to be accomplished, once you have this partition of endeavors, then you start making progress in each channel. Over-Preparing is not defined (IMO) as a problem of inadequate rate of progress, rather it is that you can never succeed with your activities because you are not making any progress in a critical channel, and this weirdly magnifies the perceived difficulty of the missing piece, leading to more and more effort in the other channels. A bit like France overbuilding their defenses with the Maginot line when instead aggressive military action in some theater of war before WWII would have exposed the extreme inadequacy of their tank and soldier communication methods.
I feel like this would be a lot easier to explain by phone. My email is riazrizvi at gmail, if you want to set that up. I’m on Pacific Standard. Open invite to anyone.
Its almost as if reality is really complex and pithy slogans are useless for anything other than grandstanding because each situation needs to be appraised on its own terms
Not totally useless, they help the less experienced understand what dimensions they should be thinking about:
- fast vs slow
- big investment vs little
- strong customer service vs Google-like "for the masses" customer service
- focus on customers vs focus on employees
There are no silver bullets and no advice is always right.
But just talking it over can be useful, as opposed to diving in without even thinking.
In the world of software, I think this counterpoint definitely applies. When faced with a new problem, especially when greenfielding, I sometimes have the impulse to just jump in and start writing code. Almost every time that I succumb to that impulse for a complex problem, I discover weird edge cases and lots of little issues which could have been avoided by further contemplation at the drawing board. Stated in a similar format: a lot of refactoring can be prevented by a few extra hours at the whiteboard.
I've also seen people do a ton of up front design, only for things to fall apart quickly during the implementation. I'm still largely a proponent of writing code sooner rather than later. Iterative development. Prove out concepts in isolation along the way. Rewrite and integrate as appropriate. But obviously you've got to do some upfront work, otherwise you might write custom software for things which have off the shelf solutions.
I find that as long as you start with the DB schema and core interfaces (system level rather than code level) and then move to framing out the general pillars of the code that you often will get 80-90% right. Refactoring will be a plenty but that is true in every project no matter the upfront planning. Just don't miss any edge cases which rewire your schema and you generally can keep a good pace on forward progress. Also it's generally true that the larger (see more complicated) the problem the more planning one should generally do.
The challenge is that it's often not possible to understand which few extra hours at the whiteboard will save you the refactoring, or even which code will be worth keeping around long enough to be worth refactoring.
I've experienced both of these extremes - days of refactoring that could've been avoided by a few extra hours thinking about the problem, and days of refactoring that could've been avoided entirely by shipping the product early and realizing it was a bad idea to begin with. I think the optimal approach is actually to sketch out a simple solution first, ship it with bugs and all to a group of small trusted testers (or even just use it yourself), and then reevaluate which parts of the product are actually useful. Then throw out the 80% that's of marginal utility and really think through how to implement the remaining 20% in a solid way that you can build upon. Repeat once you have that launched, building out additional features in the same way.
It's perhaps worth keeping in mind that Kleon is giving this advice about writing books, and that in context, this isn't "you can do it" pithy advice of the sort that DayDollar's comment is mocking. The quote from David McCullough seems to be at the heart of his point:
"When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know."
You do have to do some research; you don't charge into your project with no plan. But not only does trying to make the Most Bestest Completest Plan Ever end up being a form of procrastination (see all those folks who've spent years doing worldbuilding for their great epic fantasy novel but still can't tell you what the protagonist's character arc is, or possibly even who the protagonist is, period), it turns out that once you start actually working on the project you get a much, much better sense of what the plan needs to be. You figure out what to write in that part of your outline that says "subplot about Gail's past starts here". You start figuring out more about what the Thing your [Insert Thing] as a Service startup actually needs to insert and so on.
Exactly. People somehow mis-read this as generic advice perseverance porn or something like that when the original essay is just about starting something like an essay/noel (while feeling underprepared) vs. justifying delays through excessive research
I've always taken this approach. Before I wrote KSCrash [1], I didn't have a CLUE how crash managers worked. In fact, here's my first implementation of a crash handler [2], which did EVERYTHING wrong. I ended up innovating a number of things that were thought impossible at the time, but are commonplace today (such as tapping into the Mach error handlers).
It was the same for the Musashi 68000 emulator [3]. Before I wrote this, I had no experience with emulation other than playing one of the Pac Man emulators in the 90s, and yet the first iteration outperformed the x86 assembler core in Mame by 15%, and thus replaced it in the next version.
6 months ago, I didn't have a CLUE how ieee754 floating point worked. Now I've developed a floating point compression algorithm [4], which is being used in Concise Binary Encoding [5], also something I've never tried before.
You absolutely should try diving into things before you know what you're getting into. Even if it doesn't turn out the way you wanted, you're in for one hell of a ride, and what you'll learn is priceless.
Struggled with this a lot when I started studying foreign language.
I spent way too much time deciding between Turkish, Russian or Japanese and trying to justify my decision with arbitrary metrics of usefulness.
In the end I went with Japanese as I had the most interest in the culture, but then ran into another phase of paralysis by analysis in determining the most efficient study methods.
Finally bought a "recommended" textbook, instead of endlessly searching for the perfect learning resource and just got to it
I'm going through this now; I've wanted to learn Esperanto for awhile now, had similar experience going through YouTube trying to find the most optimal way of learning it, looking at reviews of different methods, when in reality I would have been better off choosing virtually any of the tutorials out there and just going with it.
To those curious, I've settled on Duolingo just because I realized I should just choose something, and it's free.
Felicxajn studojn! Check out the KernPunkto podcast for themed audio, "Esperanto Variety Show" Youtube channel for vlog audio, and Reddit /r/Esperante for text shorter than a book, and the /r/Esperanto [1] Discord ("Diskordo" in the sidebar) for text chat, and very occasional voice chat, but I suspect other tools are better for that (Amikumu?).
[1] /r/Esperanto is about Esperanto the language, meta-commentary or learning, often discussed in English. /r/Esperante is any topic, where the content is in Esperanto.
I will definitely check out the podcast; at what level do you feel I'll be able to listen to it and understand a reasonable percentage of what they're saying?
I've only been doing the Duolingo course for a little more than a week, and while I have enough grammar to do some very basic sentences, I'm far from fluent.
I don't know how to guess, I'd been learning on and off for a long time before I started listening, and I still can't understand all of it fluently. The things I like about their podcast particularly to recommend it is that it's a lot of content - 30 minutes or more at a time and loads of episodes, of consistently good recording quality, it's two people and sometimes a guest talking quite clearly so it's very regular speed and accents to get used to, and they talk about a topic each time so there's quite a lot of repeated vocabulary during one episode, and it's all talking no cuts to music.
Modern life distorted the notion of "most optimal", in older times I'm sure you had a much sharper sense of recognizing an opportunity and seizing every one that came.
You don't really want to waste your time trying to understand why you made a choice.
If you're like me and like learning through trial and error, then try to think of it this way.
When you are trying to choose between several different methods to learn something, you're probably going to pick the most efficient method that you could understand.
If you've decided to study with "free" study tools or a free textbook, then you're probably going to pick the one that you have the least knowledge about.
Some people need a push to dive in, because they'll never feel ready. That's whom the article uses as examples.
OTHER people though, they know that, from where they are at now, they'll be past the "challenged" stage and be put into the "fear" response - overwhelmed, unable to make progress forward because the anxiety is crippling. The constant pushing from those who have been in the first group just makes the people in the second group feel worse.
We should all consider if we're delaying for good/effective/self-helping reasons, or if we're doing so for bad/ineffective/procrastination reasons, and then we should act appropriately.
And no one should shame anyone for their choices. Maybe the choice is wrong, maybe we're identifying ourselves as having the wrong quality of reasoning...but who would know better than ourselves?
Imposter Syndrome sucks - but the reality of it is no reason to cripple yourself by diving into situations you know you aren't ready for, and then flailing and validating the feelings you had.
I think the message of this article is a good one, perhaps not always applicable depending (of course) on the individual scenario and circumstances, but a worthwhile message nonetheless. I think a large part of whether or not it applies is the risk assessment. If the risk is extremely great should failure occur and there are not major time constraints, preparation should be careful and considered. As the idiom goes, "Fortune favors the prepared".
Many, like myself, have been struck by this particular paralysis of analysis, stuck in a studious stupefaction of research and preparation, in part due to fear of failure and in part due to never feeling prepared enough. My particular case is of pursuing the Red Hat Certified System Administrator certification. I have yet to take the exam, but have put in a fair bit of time of study with books and with online resources (some of which were paid subscriptions, like LinuxAcademy). Of course, the stakes aren't extremely high - if I were to fail, I'd be out $400. Not a huge amount of money but not small change either. Needless to say, I still want to get the certification but have yet to motivate myself to commit to it. Suffice it to say, I'm one of those people that thrives and prospers under deadlines, whether said deadlines are artificial or are a true limitation on my window of preparation.
I'm also preparing for the RHCSA! It's grueling but now that I'm getting close I feel way more confident in Linux. I'd always heard it was the "entry level" cert (which is technically true) but at least in my eyes it really means something. It's not something you can cram for and wing and still pass.
Agree 100%. You can research the market, see who else is out there in your line of work, ask questions, make plans....but to make progress you just get something out there and let it loose on users and potential customers.
However this quote is referencing writing, and the author is primarily in print. Getting started is definitely key, but the kind of work being referred to here isn't typically experimented and iterated on once it's published.
This can potentially fatal for the career of a junior engineer. For personal projects it’s fine, but taking too much risk or too big a task on without clear boundaries can make you look like you can’t deliver or learn too slowly.
Unless I really trusted my boss I wouldn’t try this :(
Perfectionism and analysis paralysis are common obstacles to progress. Also fear of failure. In June of this year I decided to learn music theory and to play piano, almost on a whim, and write a blog post daily about what I learned that day[1]. I've named this year-long project "Poseur to Composer".
I'm almost halfway through and realise I have no innate abilities in music. Fortunately the application of music is very broad and there are many kinds of composers, so I can still achieve my goal. Also taking a lot of personal analytics with DailyDiary.com that I can learn from once the project is over.
man, this is so true. I have been working on a side project off and on for 5 years. sometimes I take months off, other I take 1 year, just to wait for right time...
This month I said f*ck it and started to work on it again.
I can’t agree more. The process of struggling through the doing part is one of the best ways to learn the subject matter. Read up on the fundamentals and get started.
That depends on your area of activity. If others have to pay for your failures with their time, money, health or lives, this is just somewhere between ruthless and unconscionable.
