How Smart People Sabotage Their Success • Hacker News Board

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#61

Post by gnulinux » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

projectramo wrote: post #24

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…

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

It's ironic that if you do 2 too much you can't do 1.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#62

Post by wool_gather » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

josephjrobison wrote: post #51

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. A…

Not quite exactly about "lucrative yet monotonous", but The War of Art is definitely an extended meditation on "putting in the elbow grease". It's not a manual of techniques about how to get things done, but it is inspirational for getting out of your own way, shutting up, sitting down, and writing.

It's written by someone who mostly writes movies, but it applies to anyone who does anything remotely creative, where your project has a lot of uncertainty and many opportunities to stall or talk yourself into giving up.

Highly recommended.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#63

Post by moron4hire » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

adrianm wrote: post #36

moron4hire wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that is a helpful comment, especially considering I did say I am working closely with my doctor to monitor my health and mood.

The practice of medicine is not actually that hard. It's all about risk profiles and benefit tradeoffs. The Lexapro I have been prescribed for my anxiety and the Advair for my asthma could very well be more dangerous for me than any trans-dermal Nicotine patch might be.

Our Food and Drug Administration has decided that it's relatively safe for me to buy Nicotine in whatever amounts I want without any more restriction than me being more than 18 years old. They've decided that Advair and Lexapro have risk profiles worth forcing me to go through my doctor before allowing me to have any.

We have thousands of years of data that shows Nicotine doesn't just randomly make you want to kill yourself. We have a lot of evidence that smoking tobacco can increase risk of cancer, and that the additives in commercial cigarettes can increase that risk a lot, but that doesn't apply to Nicotine specifically. There is some evidence that any sort of lung irritant can increase the risk of lung cancer, so even vaping might not be completely safe, but neither do we know the magnitude of that risk, especially separate from the many other irritants we're exposed to on a regular basis.

I'm not trying to advocate for using Nicotine. There is a risk of smokers pointing to information like this and saying "see, my disgusting habit is not that bad". That's not at all what I'm saying. But just because I don't have MD after my name doesn't mean I can't make informed decisions on my own about my own treatment. I'm just sick of this infantilizing concept that intelligent adults can't figure out a few things on their own.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#64

Post by tom_ » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

faceplanted wrote: post #10

alexcp_ wrote: post #3

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

Are you suggesting that if they were somehow truly smart they would know how not to sabotage their own success? Because that's some serious fallacious thinking right there.

Sounds like it, and I agree. How else should you judge this?

And what should you call it when people are less successful than they could be, and can't see that the cause is their counterproductive habits and apparent lack of self-awareness? - because 'smart' isn't the first word that springs to my mind.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#65

Post by nine_k » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

_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…

It takes repetition: code is a liability. The less code you produce to solve your problem, the better.

OTOH there is a cycle I see everywhere, all the time:

* A first generation of anything is bare-bones, with multiple deficiencies and corners cut, with important parts held together by duct tape.

* A second generation of the same thing tries to fix everything, adds reams of missing features, and ends up being an over-complicated, bloated monster [second system].

* A third generation of the same thing builds on the knowledge gained so far, refines the ideas, throws away all the unneeded parts, and organizes the few necessary parts elegantly and reliably.

(I use indefinite articles before "first", "second", and "third", because each may take much more than one iteration.)

Your hyper-productive developers likely produce the first two varieties. This may still be very useful, if they allow the business to grow. They as well may introduce too many technical problems and operation costs, and thus be detrimental to the business, too.

[second system]: http://wiki.c2.com/?SecondSystemEffect

(Edited: typos.)

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#66

Post by bacro » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

projectramo wrote: post #24

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…

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

I would risk number 2 and replace it with exercise (not too early or too late)

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#67

Post by epx » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

I see the boring work as the way to finance the fun stuff. Helps a lot.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#68

Post by saiya-jin » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

rcavezza wrote: post #45

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 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.

Yeah, I kind of moved of definition of good code from cool-smart-novel approach to something as simple as possible, that almost anybody can pick up, maintain and improve. This has various aspects - cleanness of the code, comments of algorithms/edge cases, overall structure, modularity etc.

Syntactic sugar can't impress me anymore, unless it comes with significant performance gains or compress the code significantly without sacrificing readability to average Joe coder (this is important part). Actually I prefer 1 page of simple clean code to 1/2-liners that do it all, until they don't. I guess I am getting old.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#69

Post by neogodless » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

3minus1 wrote: post #56

Trying to beat the stock market, when it's incredibly difficult. Even actively managed mutual funds fail to consistently beat the market average.

That's called "thinking you're smarter than everyone else." That's not the same as being intelligent. You can read about and learn how to intelligently invest your money over the desired time period for the goal you have. And if you have a long time period, you can read that you're most likely to succeed by dumping it in a total stock market index fund!

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#70

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

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.

The property of finding their complaints hilarious would make me deeply question your technical judgment & maturity while also being certain you lack leadership skills. I’d also worry you would dismiss ideas of junior team members regarding how adopting new tools could better solve business problems, which is critical even in situations where you’re constrained by stability requirements of a legacy system.