Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Absolutely luck as well. No argument there.
[flagged]
Do the Hardest Thing
21–30 of 58 posts
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely luck as well. No argument there.
[flagged]
Even if I agree with that characterization, I don’t see how that changes anything from what I said before.
I am sorry if you got “my success is purely because I am a hyper-talented genius” from my anecdote there, because that certainly wasn’t intended. There was absolutely luck involved, no argument, but my point about “applying to a job I wasn’t qualified for” still can hold.
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely luck as well. No argument there.
[flagged]
That is simply not true. If 6 completely qualified people make it to the last stage of an interview based on their qualifications, but the final chosen person was done by die roll, there was still non-luck involved. No amount of luck would have gotten you to the last stage in this example, and the only way for luck to have mattered is if you also put in the leg work.
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#24Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#25I probably interpret the message incorrectly, because to me "the hardest thing" is usually some class of some famous unsolved problem. The thing is, to be famously unsolved, many of the world's most brilliant people must have already tried and failed to solve it. There's a chance I have an edge they don't, but it's probably not wise to track your career path to the darkest of dead ends purely on the merits of it being particularly dark.
Example: you know what would be harder than anything we're talking about here? Quadrupling the performance of the best compression algorithms. It's hard. In fact, maybe there's some information theory that even says it's mathematically impossible. That makes it really hard, which makes it what all of us should immediately start working on.
The author writes elsewhere that you also have to have an edge, but that's frequently omitted from this "hardest thing" advice.
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#26Do the hardest thing or do the easiest thing cheaply
Which of course pays off precisely because doing the easiest thing cheaply is usually hard.
As someone once said: any fool can do for $2 what it takes an engineer to do for $1.
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#27People who are drawn to the hardest thing for its own sake can be exploited, like game developers and postdocs.
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#28St. John of the Cross in the Ascent of Mount Carmel,
"You should take care always to be inclined
not to the easiest thing, but to the hardest;
not to the tastiest, but to the most insipid;
not to the things that give the greatest pleasure, but to those that give the least;
not to the restful things, but to the painful ones;
not to consolation, but to desolation;
not to more, but to less;
not to the highest and dearest, but to the lowest and most despised;
not to the desire for something, but to having no desires.”
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#29I probably interpret the message incorrectly, because to me "the hardest thing" is usually some class of some famous unsolved problem. The thing is, to be famously unsolved, many of the world's most brilliant people must have already tried and failed to solve it. There's a chance I have an edge they don't, but it's probably not wise to track your career path to the darkest of dead ends purely on the merits of it bein…
Yeah I feel like this advice kind of reminds me of a lot of advice - you could rewrite it like "Do the hardest thing -- by which I mean, not the easiest thing, and not the actual hardest thing, but the thing with the right amount of hardness, a narrow band somewhere in the vast middle that you'll only be able to recognize once you have enough experience that you no longer need this advice."
Re: Do the Hardest Thing
#30I probably interpret the message incorrectly, because to me "the hardest thing" is usually some class of some famous unsolved problem. The thing is, to be famously unsolved, many of the world's most brilliant people must have already tried and failed to solve it. There's a chance I have an edge they don't, but it's probably not wise to track your career path to the darkest of dead ends purely on the merits of it bein…
I think it's supposed to be interpreted as 'the hardest thing on your list of possible startup ideas', not 'the hardest possible thing in the universe'. I think it's also an alternative way of thinking about a moat.