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How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

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Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#22
post #15
post #4

> 4. Smart people get bored easily. Being smart is not exactly the same as being curious, but if you have both these qualities you might find yourself becoming easily bored with executing the same behaviors over and over. Some types of success stem from creativity, but other types come from becoming an expert in a niche and performing a set of behaviors repeatedly. If you’re smart, curious, and have a love of learnin…

I’m seeing how a few sprinkles of VBA can make an .org so much more efficient than trying to bend management to green light an entire new web app system written in a ‘real’ programming Lang

I concur. The tedium of maintaining somebody else’s crap code in an obsolete language is an invaluable learning experience for new devs. Also, it’s hilarious to listen to the whining.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#23
post #15
post #4

> 4. Smart people get bored easily. Being smart is not exactly the same as being curious, but if you have both these qualities you might find yourself becoming easily bored with executing the same behaviors over and over. Some types of success stem from creativity, but other types come from becoming an expert in a niche and performing a set of behaviors repeatedly. If you’re smart, curious, and have a love of learnin…

I’m seeing how a few sprinkles of VBA can make an .org so much more efficient than trying to bend management to green light an entire new web app system written in a ‘real’ programming Lang

Totally. When you're new to the profession it's like you have this huge shiny new hammer and everything looks like a nail, so you want to build new custom software to solve every problem, because it's fun.

But I feel like after working on enough legacy systems you come to appreciate how crippling technical debt and over-complexity can become to an organization. What was an exciting and fun project for the creators is now the daily hell for a whole department of people.

The downside is I feel like the maturation of software as a whole is at a point now where it's diminished my ability and desire to pursue entrepreneurial ideas. There's so many powerful existing systems that can be glued together that the hassle of making something from scratch rarely seems worth it when you can get something "good enough" without custom code. On the one hand that's great for business efficiency and non-tech companies but kind of shitty for us developers who love to build stuff from scratch.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#24
post #4

> 4. Smart people get bored easily. Being smart is not exactly the same as being curious, but if you have both these qualities you might find yourself becoming easily bored with executing the same behaviors over and over. Some types of success stem from creativity, but other types come from becoming an expert in a niche and performing a set of behaviors repeatedly. If you’re smart, curious, and have a love of learnin…

boredom is part of the human condition. It has nothing to do with being smart.

Here are two tips:

1. get sleep

2. drink coffee

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#25

honest question, has anyone ever improved their lives by reading articles of this flavor ? (e.g 10 things successfully ceo's do, 10 ways to increase your chances of building a successful company)

No, you are right: generic advice is garbage.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#26
post #16
post #4

> 4. Smart people get bored easily. Being smart is not exactly the same as being curious, but if you have both these qualities you might find yourself becoming easily bored with executing the same behaviors over and over. Some types of success stem from creativity, but other types come from becoming an expert in a niche and performing a set of behaviors repeatedly. If you’re smart, curious, and have a love of learnin…

All jobs have some amount of grind. Being able to acknowledge its going to suck and push through it quickly can be super beneficial to your career. It's also one of the reasons why I encourage those in high school or college to try a non technical job first. Learn to appreciate doing monotonous tasks well.

learning to appreciate monotonous tasks is too zen/enlightened (like someone in another thread weeks ago saying they enjoyed washing to dishes) and therefore sets the bar too high. but learning to persist and endure (by way of coping mechanisms e.g. music, short breaks) is very possible.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#28
post #4

> 4. Smart people get bored easily. Being smart is not exactly the same as being curious, but if you have both these qualities you might find yourself becoming easily bored with executing the same behaviors over and over. Some types of success stem from creativity, but other types come from becoming an expert in a niche and performing a set of behaviors repeatedly. If you’re smart, curious, and have a love of learnin…

I hate to say this, but I've been finding Nicotine to be very useful for dealing with anxiety, restlessness, and boredom with rote tasks.

I've had some issues with depression and anxiety that I've been managing with my doctor, but there are still times where extreme stress can cut through the drugs and still give me some issues (work has been very political lately).

I started craving a cigarette, which is weird because I was only ever a cigar smoker, very infrequently at that, and gave it up (very easily, given I usually went months between cigars) years ago.

So under the guise of "if you're craving potato chips, maybe you're low on sodium", I bought a small, very low dosage, disposable e-cigarette at a convenience store. And the last two weeks have been some of my most stable, calm, consistently productive weeks in a very long time.

Now, I know Nicotine is very addictive, and I have no plans to go back to smoking. I'm planning to switch to a nicotine patch, as the vapor is irritating to my throat and there is still some concern of increased lung cancer risk. I think a patch will be easier to meter out the dosage, too, rather than puffing on a pen every time I feel like it. Sum total, I think I'm receiving a net benefit right now (it has also calmed my snack cravings and my blood pressure is now at a 5-year low).

Anyway, it's dangerous to self-medicate, but most people do anyway, whether it's with alcohol or bad relationships or the internet, and it's not my job to tell you what you can or cannot do. Just trying to relay that there might be some decision tradeoffs that might leave you with a net benefit.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#29
post #4

> 4. Smart people get bored easily. Being smart is not exactly the same as being curious, but if you have both these qualities you might find yourself becoming easily bored with executing the same behaviors over and over. Some types of success stem from creativity, but other types come from becoming an expert in a niche and performing a set of behaviors repeatedly. If you’re smart, curious, and have a love of learnin…

boredom is part of the human condition. It has nothing to do with being smart. Here are two tips: 1. get sleep 2. drink coffee

Check and check. Coffee definitely help me with grinding through boring mental tasks.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#30
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All jobs have some amount of grind. Being able to acknowledge its going to suck and push through it quickly can be super beneficial to your career. It's also one of the reasons why I encourage those in high school or college to try a non technical job first. Learn to appreciate doing monotonous tasks well.

learning to appreciate monotonous tasks is too zen/enlightened (like someone in another thread weeks ago saying they enjoyed washing to dishes) and therefore sets the bar too high. but learning to persist and endure (by way of coping mechanisms e.g. music, short breaks) is very possible.

There's also different kinds of boring/tedious though. I'd argue it's much easier to learn to enjoy washing your dishes at home than it is to enjoy slogging through trying to grok horrible legacy code. Maybe that's just me though.
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