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How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

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Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#111

Post by dageshi »

thrower123 wrote: post #43
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…

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. https://www.gwern.net/Nootropics

Genuine question based on personal experience, is nicotine itself addictive or is it nicotine + method of delivery?

Cause as someone who smokes cigars (don't inhale, do absorb nicotine via the mouth lining) I really don't find them addictive at all, that seems broadly the case with most cigar/pipe smokers we generally aren't addicted to them.

And yet cigarettes are obviously super addictive, so is it something else in cigarettes that's adding to the addictive nature? Or inhaling into the lungs, where presumably you'd get a much faster hit or higher dose?

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#112

Post by abledon »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #70
stopnamingnuts wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

parent comment could be interpreted many ways but heres my take.

there are many types of humour one can appreciate: https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/07/19/there-are-nine-...

If someone can't lighten up and find humour in life, i'd say they are mature enough to graduate life and go on to the next realm lol.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#113

Post by alexandercrohde »

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)

I disagree lumping this type of article with "10 things successful CEO's do." I don't think you can reject all lists because of the majority are garbage "listicles."

Personally, I think there's a lot of actionable information in this article, for example about intelligent people having greater difficulty handling situations when they feel threatened than non-intelligent people.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#114

Post by motohagiography »

Seems survivor bias explains why many ostensibly successful people are boring. What is the anti-pattern in our organizations that produces leaders who lack competence and charisma? It's like somehow we've managed to collectively optimize against producing people others might actually admire.

Arguably much of what the author calls "relationship building," manifests in many organizations as "ability to conspire to undermine more talented and honest people."

Perhaps highly intelligent people do not belong in large organizations precisely because that particular talent is optimized for explosive growth and change that large orgs are necessarily structured to suppress in favour of stability.

One should recognize whether they are more of a fox or a hedgehog, and then decide where they belong. If you are really that intelligent, you should feel obligated to take outsize risks, because the success that comes from anything other than your talent will feel empty and dishonest. I also find that feelings of failure, shame, and regret are inversely proportional to the amount of risk I took. I wonder if that's generally true.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#115

Post by projectramo »

coldtea wrote: post #50
projectramo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-step…

The alternative to generic advice isn't "precise instructions", it is specific advice.

Generic advice: if you want your startup to succeed, work had and focus.

Specific advice has to do with a situation. "I have trouble meeting my sales targets." Advice: "Hire a sales person." Q: "I don't know how?" Advice: "Do you have an HR network?" etc.

The hardest part is definitely not sticking to generic advice. Generic advice is contradictory, obvious or both. (Stay focused on the big picture, vs. be detail oriented. They are both true at different times).

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#116

Post by sonnyblarney »

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.

"All jobs have some amount of grind"

Almost all real jobs are mostly grind.

Even startups ... a good one, is 99% stupid, annoying details, some of which would be fun if you were not so busy.

Airtable.

What a cool app! In the news today.

"But I have to get fing xyz done fing now, so abc can ship out to Hong Kong before 5 hurry up!"

So there's not time to search, explore, try it out, it's just a very rapid short query to figure out the essential basics and move on.

Early stage is all a grind and there's nary a moment in between.

Apologies for the language.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#117

Post by chobeat »

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.

The last one is probably the hardest to relate to because we live immersed in a ideology that values reason and rational thought above everything else. That's the best tool a human has and can solve every problem if used properly. That's what we inherited from a 300 hundred years old cultural movement that today feels outdated. The whole premise is faulty, a good amount of people got over it already, but not society as a whole and for sure not engineers, because supposedly they are good at analytical thinking. It's hard to willingly let go your position of power by saying: "well, the thing I'm good at maybe it's not the most important in the world".

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#119

Post by 3minus1 »

neogodless wrote: post #69
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!

I still think it's a trap that a lot of smart people fall into. I know a lot of really smart people who try to beat the stock market.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#120

Post by andyidsinga »

longerthoughts wrote: post #99
thwy12321 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's actually that individuals with high levels of academic success don't need to start a company, they already have very good high paying career options. And so starting a company has a high level of opportunity cost.

Do you think most founders didn't have decent career prospects before starting a company? Are you suggesting that people start companies because they think being a founder is likely to be a high paying job? What founders are trading up in salary when they're starting their company?

in his first sentence : s/need/dont want to

There seems to be anecdotal evidence. I've read about and talked to founders who have said things like "They just could't get hired" or "couldn't handle working for someone else" and "had no other option but to start their own business".

that said - very likely a survivor bias in those samples..

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