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How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

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Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#101

Post by ryanwaggoner »

5. Smart people sometimes see in-depth thinking and reflection as the solution to every problem.

...

Which of these five patterns do you identify with the most? Try rank-ordering them. Are there colleagues or other people in your life who seem to fall into these traps?

Err...how ironic.

More to the point, it seems like #5 should actually be about thinking and reflecting poorly. Taking a break from thinking about your career decision to solve a puzzle might help you think better when you pick it up again. It won't solve the problem directly.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#102

Post by ratsimihah »

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 spent most of the day trying to get access to the new Instagram API when all I wanted to do was getting some data for my ML model.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#104

Post by andyidsinga »

allenu wrote: post #100
robertAngst wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagreed with that point, thinking through things means not making the mistakes later. Presenting your data should spark questions or proposals or agreement regardless how much time you put into it. I agreed with the first 4 points, but the last one seemed weak.

I read that point as sort of analysis paralysis where you just end up spending a lot of time researching and thinking through and not enough time taking action. For me, I've noticed there are times when I use thinking as a crutch to avoid actually doing. Often, doing, making a mistake, and then correcting is more expedient than analyzing all options to find the optimal one.

This is pretty spot on - I hate to be the one arguing for "less thought" on a subject/concept etc. But I've definitely gone too far too often .. so I try to stop earlier more often now - for feedback (and implementation as you suggest) knowing I can always go deeper.

I find that asking one's self this question is helpful : "Are the barriers to believe for concept ________ technical or something else?"

If the answer is that there aren't deep technical barriers - its a good time to stop and start collecting feedback.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#105

Post by spydum »

moron4hire wrote: post #63
adrianm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I whole heartedly agree with your logic and opinions on this: have you met many adults? They are awful at critical thinking. It strikes me that this is indeed a good chunk of why health/medicine is hard. Some people literally can’t be trusted to evaluate complex decisions effectively. So you end up with highly regulated practices, and those people who have the mental capacity are left out.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#106

Post by JustSomeNobody »

joshdev wrote: post #16
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…

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.

I agree. A lot of the devs I know who had non tech jobs have a better appreciation for business decisions and management than do those that just went into a dev job.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#107

Post by dageshi »

WalterSear wrote: post #60
bonniemuffin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with this, boring & monotonous code tasks are basically excruciating because you've got to concentrate on them hard and yet you'd rather be doing just about anything else.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#108

Post by devonkim »

chrstphrhrt wrote: post #34
bootsz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe I’m just weird but I’ve never really defended my code because I never found defensiveness to be helpful for moving projects forward. In fact, most of the code I’ve put out in my career has been rushed under pressure to deliver something fast so most of the time I’m distancing myself from the work usually saying “that wasn’t written by me, it was my evil twin that comes out at 2 am.” Trying to fix the problems of the past that keeps your codebase from improving at a better pace isn’t something shameful to me as much as a matter of pride - that you have learned from your mistakes and are not above reproach. The best stuff for me is what I do after iterating many times without fear of breaking anything though and that’s exactly what you would hope from a codebase matured through TDD.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#109

Post by allenu »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #9

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)

Often, they act as jumping points to look at things differently and get the ball rolling. If you see enough of the same theme, you might start changing your behavior or at least looking into it. This article reminded me of some of my weaknesses that I need to work on.

It's like advertising. A single ad probably isn't going to get you to go and take action, but lots of ads over time sway your opinion.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#110

Post by colechristensen »

robertAngst wrote: post #98
andyidsinga wrote: post #88

> 5. Smart people sometimes see in-depth thinking and reflection as the solution to every problem. Bright people are accustomed to succeeding through their thinking skills, but can sometimes overlook when a different approach would be more beneficial. This really resonated with me. One of the "problems" with over thinking things and "figuring out all the potential problems" is that when presenting the ideas/concepts/…

I disagreed with that point, thinking through things means not making the mistakes later. Presenting your data should spark questions or proposals or agreement regardless how much time you put into it. I agreed with the first 4 points, but the last one seemed weak.

It seems very open to interpretations but my take on it is a combination of the addages

"Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away"

"Perfection is the enemy of good"

which in the context here relates to smart people wanting to overdo or over-complicate things restated as

"premature optimization is the root of all evil"

recognizing simply that it is possible, easy, and more frequent for smart people to do worse solving problems by trying too hard to do better.

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