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How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

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Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#131

Post by SilasX »

_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…

I think there's "10x" and then there's real 10x.

Fake 10x: Turns out lots of stuff quickly but it crumples under edge cases and has non-obvious tight couplings that keep biting you. No one else can make changes to their code. None of their stuff can really be used when they leave the company, but they can fix it really fast.

Real 10x: Is able to explain what they did and why bugs happened. Easy to follow along in their code, you get the impression the job was easy. You constantly find yourself turning to their old solution, when it really matters, rather than the new way everyone's trying to migrate to. Suggests ways their existing system can handle new business use-cases with only a trivial modification. You keep trying to improve upon their work but keep concluding that there was a good reason for all their decisions.

Depending on the context, someone might be referring to one or the other.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#132

Post by ballpark »

kradroy wrote: post #125
astrodust wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you can coach and pivot someone from that "must make everything perfect" mentality to one where they can take a more pragmatic approach to things.

This is really hard. Really hard. It can take years to get an engineer to that sweet spot. When I build teams I usually select "builders" and "improvers." Improvers can't create new systems because they spend all day theorizing edge cases and what-ifs. Builders can't improve systems because they spend all day theorizing new systems to replace the legacy one they see as imperfect. You also have to get the right ratio…

I've never heard it stated that way, but I can strongly identify with this. After 18 yrs in the industry, I am finding more and more that I enjoy improving much more than building.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#133

Post by core-questions »

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.

> Presenting your data should spark questions or proposals or agreement regardless how much time you put into it

Step back and take a look at that statement again.

If you put too little time into it, it'll spark questions - about you, and your process, and the lack of completeness.

If you put too much time in, it'll also spark questions about your productivity; or it will overwhelm the audience and put them into that sort of compliant/bored state where they somewhat shut down and don't engage.

There's an art to answering just enough potential questions while leaving room for people to feel like they're contributing, which builds engagement and really helps turn bored listeners into real stakeholders.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#134

Post by sevensor »

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…

> But in reality looking back I see that a lot of that sh*t-shoveling has actually made me much better and wiser at my profession,

I agree with this to the point that I seek out the stupidest, most concrete, least automated solution as a point of reference before I build anything smart.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#135

Post by RandyC42 »

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…

Check out "Time Management for System Administrators" by Thomas A. Limoncelli.

It is showing it's age technology wise, being published in 2005, but a lot of the fundamental principles still apply.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#136

Post by jnbiche »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #78

I'm smart, but wouldn't say I am super smart...but I am pretty damn tenacious to perfect whatever I am doing...this makes people impressed with my work but frustrated at my slow pace...to the point where the latter is interfering with my career.

I've have the exact same problem. My tenaciousness has given me the ability to understand concepts and obtain skills beyond my "natural ability". But it doesn't make me fast at them.

Anyone out there successfully overcome this problem?

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#137

Post by lrc »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #8

Reading that I can’t help but think most people in the modern knowledge work classes probably identify with a lot of it. Doesn’t everyone have these feelings? This all seems very normal to me, but I’m definitely the target audience. High IQ that was praised from a young age, hated school but did well with no effort, hated team work all my life, value deep thinking as the solution to almost any problem, successful in…

/me feels the unsettling presence of a doppelgänger

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#138

Post by ptr »

Skrillex wrote: post #130
le-mark wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you realize it's code you wrote. Happened to me when our children were little. There were large parts of a system I'd written, sleep deprived, that I had no recollection of writing. Version control said I did, but I didn't remember it.

That can make it even better, particularly if you can remember why you were making the decisions that you did.

Yes! It's actually great -- you can rant as hard as you want because you know the author won't be upset.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#140

Post by Aperson4321 »

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…

Persistence is a skill that needs to be trained just like all skills, intellectually gifted people tend to get little training in it because they learn stuff fast and thus don't get the usual amount of training in it like others, so what you need to do is pick a thing you want to do that's boring and then measure the time of how long you manage to do it in one day, then you reward yourself with something, next time you try to do it for longer than last time and if you manage that then you give yourself another reward. It's just a skill, it's hard to train but train it you must if you want to be good at it. There is nothing more to it sadly, its a simple problem with a boring simple solution, you just have to put in the hours and train that skill.
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