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Do the Hardest Thing

justinjackson.ca

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Re: Do the Hardest Thing

#51

Post by Noaidi »

Jarwain wrote: post #50
Noaidi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not say there was no non luck involved. I said the outcome is always determined by luck. An example will help maybe. If I need $10 and someone tells me they will give me $9 but the last dollar will be give to me based on the flip of a coin, I only can get that $10 if I am lucky. And you can even put the luck at the beginning. Same situation but the person says I will give you $9 only if you get the first $1 bas…

Your two examples are extremely different. Walking away with $9 if you're unlucky and walking away with $0 if you're unlucky are two incredibly different outcomes. Being successful from winning the lottery, versus being successful from working hard enough such that you qualify for a lottery with significantly better odds. Sure luck is Involved, the outcome is determined by luck, but work is putting a hand on the scal…

You can diminish luck, but you can’t get rid of it. That’s my point.

You said it yourself and your own sentence. The outcome is determined by luck. That was my only point which no one seems to want to accept.

Re: Do the Hardest Thing

#52

Post by sirtaj »

Noaidi wrote: post #51
Jarwain wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your two examples are extremely different. Walking away with $9 if you're unlucky and walking away with $0 if you're unlucky are two incredibly different outcomes. Being successful from winning the lottery, versus being successful from working hard enough such that you qualify for a lottery with significantly better odds. Sure luck is Involved, the outcome is determined by luck, but work is putting a hand on the scal…

You can diminish luck, but you can’t get rid of it. That’s my point. You said it yourself and your own sentence. The outcome is determined by luck. That was my only point which no one seems to want to accept.

But what is there to accept? I was lucky to be born and not be run over by a truck today. What is the purpose of this information? How do I internalize it and use it to guide my behaviour?

Re: Do the Hardest Thing

#53

Post by tripledry »

Noaidi wrote: post #45
tripledry wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least they sent the application, that was effort. So it can't be 100% luck right?

I did not say it was all luck. I said if any part of the outcome depends on luck, effort is meaningless when it come to the result. This is not to say that doing nothing is better, I am just being realistic.

I might have misunderstood as english is not my native language but the 100% doesn't sit right with me in the original sentence.

In general I feel people downplay the effects of luck by a lot. My thinking is that the effort is everything but meaningless, in fact it's probably the only thing you can control.

Re: Do the Hardest Thing

#54

Post by ahartmetz »

steno132 wrote: post #37
nabbed wrote: post #20

In my own tiny way, I applied this logic when trying to be a contributor to an existing and popular open source project. I found that puzzling out poorly-written bug report tickets, ignored by the extremely busy experts on the project, I could find work to do. I started by looking at well written tickets (to-the-point descriptions, minimal reproduction examples), but that method got me no work: some expert on the pro…

Seems like you tore through some outdated Jira tickets, which is cool, but what was the impact of your work? Hard doesn't mean impactful. In fact that's one of the biggest mistakes I see junior engineers make! But glad you got that learning experience, as you become more senior you'll definitely develop a better understanding of what drives actual impact.

>impact

Not everything in life is correctly evaluated according to Meta performance review criteria, probably not even what people are doing at Meta.

Re: Do the Hardest Thing

#56

Post by Chrise_N »

Tried this. My version was dropping 9-5 for spending years learning to code and starting a "company", instead of getting hitched. No idea if it's working out though. Stay tuned.

Re: Do the Hardest Thing

#57

Post by scared_together »

royal__ wrote: post #46
steno132 wrote: post #32

This is dumb. Don't do hard things, do things which have a high ROI. I could try to swim across the Pacific Ocean, walk across Siberia or consume a family size portion of McDonalds in a single sitting. All those things are hard. All those things have zero to negative ROI. Doing hard things won't get you anywhere. Most hard things are useless. And a lot of the most valuable things are not hard at all.

To be a contrarian, you could possibly become very famous if you swam across the Pacific Ocean or even walked across Siberia. Not sure on the McDonald's though, might be harder to get sponsorship for that.

Mukbangs are a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukbang

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