I've said that ambition beats smart any day of the week. I have seen it in my life multiple times. (Of course, ambition plus smart is a killer combo.)
How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
41–50 of 221 posts
Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
#42Read about Belbin team roles if you've never done so. If you're someone that thrives on finding new things and learning them, revel in it, don't beat yourself up - that's valuable. Others thrive on crossing 't's and dotting 'i's - and good luck to them, the whole point is that teams succeed with the right blend of people. https://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles/ Bottom line if you try to be perfect at all dime…
I feel like all too often that leads to an outlook where you assume whatever job you end up in must meet your preferences in all things, and it's a pretty brittle way to conduct your career. Sure, from an individual standpoint that would optimize your short term happiness, but I've found the ability to know what the role requires and be that person is a skill that's rewarding in it's own way (and often, but not always, requires a lot of growth to do it well since roles change over time).
And from a system level view, business needs don't necessarily match those roles in whatever ratio people happen to naturally occur at. I'm going to go out on a limb and say there is a gross oversupply of people who like starting things but not finishing them.
As someone who hires and manages people, if I could somehow tap into a foolproof supply of people who are primarily motivated to grind away at any problem given to them until it's finished, and have just enough sense to be effective, but not enough to start solving problems just for the sake of the novelty I could probably take over the world in about 3 weeks.
Luckily those kinds of people are almost completely absent from the human species and it's fairly difficult to organize and achieve arbitrary goals without a lot of politics and people skills in addition to simple coercion and/or funds and a plan.
Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
#43> 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…
Nicotine was one of the few nootropics that had real measureable positive effects in gwern's testing. Unfortunately it's addictive as hell, but nonetheless, you'd think that as much as we research into opiods and other narcotics, there would be more effort to find safer forms of nicotine or nicotine derivatives.
Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
That’s just it’s...IMO it’s saying if you are smart and not successful you have no ability or skills.
Which we all know isn’t true. The lack of social mobility in the US has nothing to do with lack of ability or skills. Power and wealth are to concentrated and “success” is more dependent on access to those than being smart, having abilities or skills.
Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is so interesting. I have met many people that others considered "geniuses" because they solved hard problems and got things done fast. And then 3 years later, people still complain about having to deal with "[Name of Developer] Code". I guess if you move fast and write code that others can't read, it's easy to get labeled a genius.
Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
#46Title should be: How people who think they are smart sabotage their success.
I kinda agree. I've seen too many people using their self-diagnosed over-intelligence to excuse some of their surprisingly non-smart behavior. Behavior that leads to failure in their enterprises.
This kind of article always make me uncomfortable because I feel smartness/cleverness/intelligence does not seem to be objective enough a quality to lead to such analysis. And some people may identify with such patterns and declare themselves as "too smart" and not try harder, believing the problem is from the other side of the table.
Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is why the 10x is a unicorn. HN likes to shift the definition every time it's found to have some quality we don't like. In the real world there is a broad spectrum of devs and their capabilities. Each one has strengths, weaknesses, areas of expertise, and character flaws. You'll basically never find one that just blindly produces 10x the code of the rest of your team without some downside.
Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
#48As an aside, the font(and size) they've chosen for the copy in this article looks dreadful on a Win10/Chrome setup. Chrome tells me it's: "Garamond,Baskerville,"Times New Roman",serif". I don't know if it's using an embedded version of Garamond, or the one that ships with the OS, but I could barely get through the article.
Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
#49honest 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)
Skimming the list in the article and then reading the reactions here on HN have been pretty helpful for me in identifying some of my own problems. E.g. annoyance with diplomacy.
Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success
#50honest 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.
There are no silver bullets or precise instructions to life.
Most things must be dealt with generic advice (and it's still surprising how many get generic advice wrong, and do the opposite).
And most of what we do as people are not that unique anyway, to require any non-generic advice.
The hard part is sticking to the generic advice and making it work.
But there are no, or very few, shortcuts and precise step-by-steps procedures to success.