Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 221 posts

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#51

Post by josephjrobison »

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…

This part was also key:

"Solution: Try taking a 30,000-foot view of when it’s worth tolerating some boredom to collect easy wins when it comes to your overall success. Instead of attempting dramatic change, decide when tolerating short periods (a few minutes or hours) of boredom could have a very beneficial impact on your success. For instance, devoting 5 hours a week to an activity that’s monotonous but lucrative. Additionally, make sure you have enough outlets for your love of learning across the various domains of your life, including your work, hobbies, physical fitness, understanding yourself etc."

Doing work that's lucrative yet monotonous is one of the biggest struggles. I have in front of me a great strategy that I know will work, but I'm avoiding putting in the elbow grease.

Anyone know of a book that goes into this in detail? I know I'm procrastinating more by looking for a book to solve this, but at the same time, when I understand something thoroughly, I do it more often!

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#52

Post by eismcc »

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…

This is the most succinct description of my experience I’ve seen. Thanks!

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#53

Post by watwut »

AWildC182 wrote: post #47
friendly_chap wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imo, the whole concept is idiotic and serves nothing.

Of course it is possible for one developer to be better then other, but it is not necessary fixed. It changes during lifetime of same person, depends on technology, experience, type of project and other factors.

Meanwhile the typical use is to look at some stereotype you have in head that has nothing to do with the project or position at question and then wonder why it did not worked out.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#54

Post by strken »

AWildC182 wrote: post #47
friendly_chap wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I reckon that if there's such a thing as a 10x dev, they'd act as a force multiplier rather than a faster assembly line worker. Fixing architectural problems early raises the productivity of everyone who ever has to touch the code, as does setting up practises like code review and automated testing, and as does culling bad features early on.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#57

Post by drinane »

Contains a typo... someone should just figure out the top queries related to 1. Fear 2. Guilt 3. Shame

And generate random buzzword articles... LOL ... that's a unicorn folks!

"Develop relationships with people who you trust to give you help constructive feedback."

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#58

Post by nness »

H1Supreme wrote: post #48

As 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.

Looks like your browser isn't picking up the web-fonts. Having disabled the web-font, the font-stack they've chosen is definitely a lot harder for my to read.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#59

Post by nine_k »

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…

> performing a set of behaviors repeatedly

I suspect there are some wins to be had by thinking on how to automate or otherwise delegate well-understood repeated behaviors, while still collecting the proceeds from them.

This is something that could interest a smart and curious person for some time, and actually benefit from the intellect and curiosity expended on it. The person can also reframe the "repetitious monotonous task" as "learning the best way to execute and then automate the task". But learning with any confidence takes a lot sampling for any statistical significance!

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#60

Post by WalterSear »

bonniemuffin wrote: post #39
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.

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.

The nature of the work doesn't allow that. Coding takes all your thought - even when it's boring and monotonous.

The comparisons being made to washing dishes aren't realistic.

Post reply on HN