41–50 of 51 posts
ugh, I can't stand this. 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer. 2. When you spend 20 years of your life doing that one thing, you'd better succeed because if not, it means you failed everything . 3. You need to define success. Being awesome at one thing is not for everyone. Steve Jobs' la…
ugh, I can't stand this. 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer. 2. When you spend 20 years of your life doing that one thing, you'd better succeed because if not, it means you failed everything . 3. You need to define success. Being awesome at one thing is not for everyone. Steve Jobs' la…
> 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer. That's a matter of ambition/risk. That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that. It's just that he many not be good enough to make a career of it. So yes he will look foolish but in the end, he will still be better than the rest.…
I'm not really critiquing what you wrote, because I'm not sure how it applies to what I'm thinking, but to me it seems like there's a danger in assuming that degree of success in life or lack thereof arises from lack of ambition per se. I think as ambition increases, so does risk, in general, so lack of success could be due to lack of ambition, but many very ambitious people who just have been on the bad side of circumstances, in the wrong place or at the wrong time.
I worry a bit about an implicit assumption that we often make that someone could always have "tried harder," which seems to be the argument of the essay now that I think about it. If a failure situation arises, we tend to pick it apart and look for what the person did wrong, and then if we find anything, ascribe blame to the person. In some situations--maybe always, that sort of introspection is helpful, but often I worry it misses the broader picture, in terms of the value of what was given up, or why that person was put in the position to begin with. We also don't scrutinize success as often to look at stupid decisions that could have panned out very poorly, and blame the individual--often there's an implicit pass, like "oh this person is so lucky," as if that luck is an attribute of the person, and marvel at that luck instead as if it's something to reward.
This essay kind of hit hard, because at middle age I've realized that the field / career area I'm in is in crisis, a sort of house of cards, and at some level driven by fundamentally unethical or unsound phenomena. My choice is basically to suck it up and just go along with it, or ditch the whole thing and start over as if I was in my 20s. If I ditch things, I feel like I'm by definition a failure by many, and ignoring this compounding benefits idea, but if I stay with it, I'm just supporting a system that I feel resentful about and that I think is going to fall apart eventually one way or another, even if some are inevitably going to be remaining at the top of that rubble pile.
I guess one way to think about it is this: in life, for most things, that compounding benefits curve is accompanied by a compounding costs curve, and sometimes the difference doesn't look compounding at all.
ugh, I can't stand this. 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer. 2. When you spend 20 years of your life doing that one thing, you'd better succeed because if not, it means you failed everything . 3. You need to define success. Being awesome at one thing is not for everyone. Steve Jobs' la…
> 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer. That's a matter of ambition/risk. That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that. It's just that he many not be good enough to make a career of it. So yes he will look foolish but in the end, he will still be better than the rest.…
> That guy will still be a very good golfer if he focuses on that.
From what I read somewhere, he retired from golf because of back injury. So if my memory serves right, it renders your "[he] will still be a very good golfer" ridiculous, because no, he will never be a golfer anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” [1] I'm not strongly for/against either position: both can be true in different contexts. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4324-shoot-for-the-moon-eve...
I think shooting for the moon works when there's several rungs of possible results to land on. In startups, the results tend to be so polarized that shooting for the moon again and again can burn you out.
ugh, I can't stand this. 1. No, it will not necessarily happen. You can focus on one thing and still fail. See the story about the guy who dropped everything to try and be a professional golfer. 2. When you spend 20 years of your life doing that one thing, you'd better succeed because if not, it means you failed everything . 3. You need to define success. Being awesome at one thing is not for everyone. Steve Jobs' la…
I think a citation is required for point #3. As I understand it, Steve Jobs' last words were "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." The best-at-business quote is fake: http://www.snopes.com/steve-jobs-deathbed-speech/
Of course, this ignores all the people who dropped everything to pursue something and failed, catastrophically too, because they let everything else suffer in pursuit of this objective.
It's like singling out big slot machine winners and saying, "look! the common thread among all these people who won it huge is that they spent thousands of dollars, all day, every day, playing the slots, and eventually they made it. So if you want to make money playing slots, you have to just keep at it!"
Then his instagram bio;
I write, run a business, podcast, draw, run, and lift weights. Get my free ebook that teaches you to 2X your productivity.