Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

adaobi.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 225 posts

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#131

Post by Jensson »

hasbot wrote: post #126
Jensson wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They measure motivation by how hard the person works at achieving that goal, of course if you measure it that way the pills will "increase motivation". ADHD isn't a failure of motivation, it is a failure to put in effort doing stuff you are motivated to do. It doesn't magically make you motivated to do stuff you don't care about. > You might be right, but, at least for me, the number of tasks that meet that criteria…

Doing taxes and bills are not what I consider high reward more like moderate penalty. And, no, I don't pay my bills: everything is auto-pay.

> Doing taxes and bills are not what I consider high reward more like moderate penalty

Try not paying bills or filing your taxes and you will see what happens, doing the task prevents you from getting a severe punishment (relative time spent on the task), so it is high reward. People with ADHD tend to be late paying bills or doing taxes and struggle with filling in forms in general, ie they regularly fail to do simple high reward tasks.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#134

Post by mrweasel »

paxys wrote: post #14

From my experience in the tech industry I can say with utmost confidence that "not smart"/"talentless" people who are determined and hard-working lead to significantly better real world results than geniuses who are lazy, unmotivated or overall not action oriented. The vast majority of problems at any company are easy and don't need any big technological breakthroughs to solve. They are instead held back by (1) lack…

There's an old interview with Rasmus Lerdorf somewhere on the net, where he talks about just hacking something together and make it work. It doesn't have to be good or the best way of doing things, then some "computer science guy" can come along and fix it later.

In many ways that's a good way of creating security issues, but it's also an excellent way of actually getting a feature build. The smarter people is being given a sense of direction, by being shown the bad implementation and tasked with improving it.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#135

Post by matheusmoreira »

chii wrote: post #16
paxys wrote: post #14

From my experience in the tech industry I can say with utmost confidence that "not smart"/"talentless" people who are determined and hard-working lead to significantly better real world results than geniuses who are lazy, unmotivated or overall not action oriented. The vast majority of problems at any company are easy and don't need any big technological breakthroughs to solve. They are instead held back by (1) lack…

> (1) lack of effort or (2) lack of organization. (3) lack of reward I say the former 2 is caused by 3. Why would anyone put in over-time to solve a problem, if they dont know how well they'd get rewarded by it? It's why small/founder owned startups get more done with less, because they know themselves how much reward they'd get when putting in the hard yards.

> Why would anyone put in over-time to solve a problem, if they dont know how well they'd get rewarded by it?

Because they enjoy it. Because they want to create cool stuff. Intrinsic motivation!

Maybe they have to turn it into some kind of business in order to sustain it. Sometimes things have huge operational costs and people are unable to maintain their existence without making money. The ideal of creation for its own sake remains though.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#136

Post by Avicebron »

blueflow wrote: post #130
Avicebron wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the correct answer is to cut the styrofoam. https://www.amazon.com/Foam-Electric-Cutting-Machine-Control...

A form of "Use other people's solutions"

have you ever heard of steam tables?

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#137

Post by matheusmoreira »

sph wrote: post #83
paxys wrote: post #14

From my experience in the tech industry I can say with utmost confidence that "not smart"/"talentless" people who are determined and hard-working lead to significantly better real world results than geniuses who are lazy, unmotivated or overall not action oriented. The vast majority of problems at any company are easy and don't need any big technological breakthroughs to solve. They are instead held back by (1) lack…

PSA for people that believe they are somewhat smart, have cool ideas yet seemingly no power whatsoever to actually work on them. If you believe you are chronically lazy and feel it is causing issues in your life. If you feel you are living at 10% your true potential: Get tested for ADHD. If that is your problem, know that the chemical fix for it is extremely effective. It's taken me 30+ years of self-hate, a suggesti…

I have attention deficit disorder and I agree with you. I got diagnosed as an adult and treatment changed my life. It felt like my brain's features had finally been unlocked. The effect of the medication got less pronounced over time but it is still very noticeable. The effect also proved to be long lasting: significant improvements in my cognitive functions remained even without the medication.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#138

Post by unwise-exe »

e2021 wrote: post #7

This is good advice, but I think it is for people who think they are not smart, but are actually just inexperienced. I feel like someone who was actually not smart would have trouble executing on these steps

> This is a blog post aimed at people who want to do important work or make meaningful contributions to work, but **feel** they aren’t that smart and don’t have any talent.

So yeah, it's not for people who truly are not smart, it's for people who limit themselves as a result of mispercieving their own abilities.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#139

Post by azornathogron »

mrweasel wrote: post #134
paxys wrote: post #14

From my experience in the tech industry I can say with utmost confidence that "not smart"/"talentless" people who are determined and hard-working lead to significantly better real world results than geniuses who are lazy, unmotivated or overall not action oriented. The vast majority of problems at any company are easy and don't need any big technological breakthroughs to solve. They are instead held back by (1) lack…

There's an old interview with Rasmus Lerdorf somewhere on the net, where he talks about just hacking something together and make it work. It doesn't have to be good or the best way of doing things, then some "computer science guy" can come along and fix it later. In many ways that's a good way of creating security issues, but it's also an excellent way of actually getting a feature build. The smarter people is being…

Perhaps this is how the world ends up with "PHP: a fractal of bad design"?

Not that I want to be too snarky about it: I used PHP a bit back in the LAMP stack days, and as bad as the language was it was easy to get stuff up and running. So perhaps Mr Lerdorf is right. (I hear PHP might be somewhat better now, though I can't vouch for that myself)

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#140

Post by mistermann »

nine_k wrote: post #121
Jensson wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That jives very well with the first point: "Be audacious. Most people who are talented or smart are scared of doing things." In general smart people want to understand what they are doing before they do it. This means you can often beat them at a task by simply doing without understanding, which is why General Kurt told us to be wary about such people.

Doing without understanding usually misses some "obvious" detail, and that makes the whole thing a lot less useful, if not harmful.

A concrete but flawed implementation can also be an excellent catalyst for brighter minds, gives them something newer to focus on, discuss, iterate on, etc.
Post reply on HN