Live data from Hacker News

How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

hbr.org

191–200 of 221 posts

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#191
Been there. Done that. Have been trying to change my thinking by more thinking or some actions given prescriptions. It just doesn't work. Energy is neutral. It's how and where you use it makes the all difference.

All that this article is providing is prescriptions about how not to misuse it. The solutions given are just a prescription not really a solution. Few people might follow it successfully for few days or months and eventually get back to their conditioning. Or if they succeed in through the prescription given, they will attract other problems in their life. That's what Psychologist do, they help retrospect your life in little depth than you can and then help you persuade that you understood the problem and recognise the solution for it. But essentially what they have done is, either suppress it for the sake of ethics, morality etc. And convert the problems into some other problems unconsciously which errupts in your life after few months or years.

The very thing we are asked to drop through prescriptions or advices becomes difficult to let go of. In the very attempt of forgetting you have to keep remembering it, just to forget it. It keeps coming back to your mind. In order to forget, the more you will need to remember it the stronger that memory becomes.

What essentially they are suffering or fail to recognise is that "Knowing the path is not synonymous to walking the path". But it's easier said or understood by reading it than done.

If you seek permanent transformation, something fundamental has to be changed. Something which is the very root cause of it. Only inner transformation can help.

Dynamic meditation given by OSHO is dynamite to realease the mental and body energy blockages which cause such and various other types of hurdles. It helps you energy center to move from Body to Mind to Heart to Being.

http://www.oshodynamic.com/five-stages.html

Before adopting this meditation I have asked thousand questions about it's genuineness and how it works but none of that help. It is only by actually trying for few weeks I could see the change in my character.

Note: I am not associated with any OSHO's meditation centre or their work. I am just someone who tried it and found it useful.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#192
post #131
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Exactly. There are cowboys and then there are master crafters. Both will rapidly produce awesome results, but the cowboy's results are messy, fragile and temperamental, while the master crafter's results are robust and easy to understand.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#193
post #171

I remember reading once that students who excel in high school (valedictorians and salutatorians) are underrepresented as successful company founders, meaning that they occur at a lower rate than one would expect from chance alone. I think the hypothesis was that these people tended to develop a perfectionistic (or even people pleasing) approach, and that this strategy works really well for "doing what you're told".…

I like your theories, and the other theories here. There are lots of possibilities. People who do well in school may require structured settings and feed off the sense of accomplishment. Maybe it backfires in less structured jobs for those people. People who overly care about meet the expectations of others may not be as good at establishing expectations for themselves. People who do well in school may have something…

I think all of your listed possibilities sound very plausible. I'd add one more thing: That if you breeze through school, you never have to learn mechanisms for dealing effectively with difficult things. Everyone has a limit to what they can handle on innate talent alone, and the higher that limit the harder you hit it. Keeping detailed notes, organising and filing your paperwork, methodical study methods, even down to getting enough sleep and exercise and eating healthily etc. are all things that 'smart kids' often don't need to do in order to perform well at school, but adults need in order to excel at high level in the real world. If you learn to use them early then you'll perform better than someone 'smarter' but with less discipline.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#194
post #131
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

This. I understand 10x as a kind of person who creates MapReduce and writes very convenient abstraction around it that anyone can use and become 2x.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#195
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a bit of a silly semantic game. There's "smart" in the sense of "general mental ability" (ie, skill in cognitive tasks), which is usually what the word is used colloquially to mean, and then there's "smart" in the sense of "making the optimal choices for long term happiness and success", which, being correlated with the first definition is often conflated. Now, sometimes these definitions come apart, ie, peop…

That's actually a very sensible way to put it.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#196
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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 second advice is only useful if you've learned (or naturally follow) the first generic kind.

If you can't sit down and wort hard when its needed (but e.g. instead expect success to come easy once you've launched your startup) or if you can't focus (but instead try to do everything at once, or you're over the place, easily distracted, etc), whichever "specific" advice you're told to meet sales targets wont make much difference.

>The hardest part is definitely not sticking to generic advice. Generic advice is contradictory, obvious or both.

It being obvious doesn't preclude it being extremely important or it being hard.

The best advice for diet can be summarized as "eat food, not too much, mostly plants". All obvious parts, all very beneficial if followed. And yet, tons of people fail to follow through, and want magic "specific advice" ("do the avocado detox", "eat 80% protein and less of 50 grams of carbs each day" etc).

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#197
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 felt the harder things to convince someone(including self) is to spend lot of time to learn the "other skills" (mentioned in the article). People do try to improve their "other skills" to some extent but that may not be enough. Feedback loop for seeing the impact of the "other skill" is long and it is harder to measure. So one doesn't know if one has learnt enough.

Regarding boring. I have found that sometime if we zoom out too much things are boring. Life is boring if we think everyday we just wakeup, work, sleep. When we zoom in and look at the variety and try to understand life becomes more interesting.

Zooming in too much also can cause boredom. Zoom into the coding too much and think I am just typing another ifThenElse or while loop or some keystrokes it can be boring too.

Usually I have found, for management work zooming out makes it interesting for me. Technical work usually is interesting at the level I see it.

Like some people mentioned listening to music, doing something else when the work look boredom can also keep one going with passion.

The other challenge is once the work becomes routine, one starts feeling anyone can do it. One starts feeling am I justifying the money I get for it?

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#198

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 unde…

Easy to say "take risks", but many of the talented ones can not really afford to take any risks, those from poverty.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

This was painfully visible during first year at university - all the gifted people who during high school didn't have to learn at home at all hit the wall. They simply couldn't manage like that anymore.

Many somehow switched and started learning/working on assignment, those who didn't didn't make it.

Re: How Smart People Sabotage Their Success

#200

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…

I agree. Reading those articles sometimes resembles reading a horoscope given that probably everyone can relate to these issues to some degree. Likely many of us think of themselves as smart, yet not reaching their true potential.

With that in mind, I wonder if that isn't a misleading assessment, a soothing, relieving conclusion that is all that uncommon at all. After all we can't all be above the median smartness line. What if you or me are actually unknowingly performing below that threshold while mistaking ourselves for a precious exception to most other people?

Post reply on HN