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How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

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Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#31

Post by joshdev »

mlevental wrote: post #26
joshdev wrote: 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.

That's fair. When I say appreciate, I mean the results of the grind. Washing Dishes or any type of cleaning isn't fun, but finding coping mechanisms (zoning out, music, etc...) you can enjoy the results.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#32

Post by _Schizotypy »

bootsz wrote: 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…

These are the types of people that belong in research.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#33

Post by _Schizotypy »

stopnamingnuts wrote: post #22
abledon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes I feel like whining about someone else's crap code is enjoyable in itself.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#34

Post by chrstphrhrt »

bootsz wrote: post #30
mlevental wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. Especially if there are other teammates who defend the bad codebase because of their association to it.

Nobody should claim washing dishes is inherently wasteful or pointless. Legacy code on the other hand, comes with a lot of social pressure to just layer on more debt.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#35

Post by syn0byte »

will_brown wrote: post #7
alexcp_ wrote: post #3

Title should be: How people who think they are smart sabotage their success.

I’d title it...How to Justify and Frame Your Success as Meritocracy In Light of People Much Smarter than you Not Succeeding Because They Lack Your Connections

or "Why it's your own fault you aren't successful despite your abilities and skills."

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#36

Post by adrianm »

moron4hire wrote: post #28
bootsz wrote: 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 becau…

I think you should talk to a doctor about this.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#37

Post by astrodust »

_red wrote: post #20
joshdev wrote: 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.

As a manager of a dev group, I've migrated away from trying to hire "10x developers" and now optimize for "intelligent and persistent". The "10x" developers are seductive, and can supercharge a project into getting version 1.0 off the ground in months instead of years. However, each one we've hired has left us worse off than before once they got bored and left us in the weeds trying to piece together what they had do…

Unless you can coach and pivot someone from that "must make everything perfect" mentality to one where they can take a more pragmatic approach to things.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#38

Post by friendly_chap »

_red wrote: post #20
joshdev wrote: 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.

As a manager of a dev group, I've migrated away from trying to hire "10x developers" and now optimize for "intelligent and persistent". The "10x" developers are seductive, and can supercharge a project into getting version 1.0 off the ground in months instead of years. However, each one we've hired has left us worse off than before once they got bored and left us in the weeds trying to piece together what they had do…

That's not a 10x developer if they don't know how to write maintanable software, you just thought they are.

The dev you describe sounds like a junior who can crank out code at high velocity.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#39

Post by bonniemuffin »

mlevental wrote: post #26
joshdev wrote: 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.

I definitely don't want my team to appreciate boring tasks! I want them to persist, endure, and then automate.

The person who grinds through the boring stuff while thinking about how to automate it so they don't have to be bored anymore, is the person I want to hire.

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