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The Right Kind of Stubborn

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#151

Post by cm2012 »

testoo wrote: post #146
cm2012 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's pretty clear, stat sig relationships between personality traits like OCEAN/Big 5 and lifetime income. Even less scientific categorization like Myers-Briggs have the most successful types earning double the least successive types in massive surveys.

this is really interesting, I'd love to read more if you have the link/links!

Here's a good article on OCEAN / Big 5 that goes over what correlates: https://www.financialplanningassociation.org/article/journal...

For myers-briggs, here's a massive 70,000 person sample survey and analysis: https://www.truity.com/blog/personality-type-career-income-s...

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#152

Post by kderbyma »

talkingtab wrote: post #122

I'm sorry, I find this simplistic. I often am impatient with people not because I am obstinate or stubborn or persistent, but because some new ideas require a new mindset. For example, let us suppose - just for argument - that the great failing of the internet is that it prevents community. I'm just saying suppose. If one then foolishly tried to discuss this, one would be inundated with comments about Facebook, X (or…

Context or domain shifting is how I tend to think of that skill and for me it is very visceral and spatial. the ability to shift between different contexts or domains and then much like walking into a new room, or getting off a plane in a new country or taking a staircase to a new level, you are exposed to new routes and options but you old ones leave you and to leave the area is to once again change contexts and return.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#153

Post by dkarl »

I once inherited a very thorny performance problem with a service. Thorny as in, the previous engineer was ordered to give up and move on because our boss was worried it was adversely affecting their mental health and their performance on other tasks.

I quickly learned that every person who found out I was working on this problem was eager to share the same three or four ideas on how to fix it. All of these ideas were early on the list of ideas that the previous engineer had ruled out multiple times in multiple ways. For the sake of thoroughness, I also tried them and ruled them out. But of course each person who wanted to share ideas didn't know they were saying the same thing I had heard a hundred times before, so the suggestions kept repeating.

Over time, dealing with the same suggestions over and over again, I learned an important lesson: when someone suggested an idea, it didn't do any good to explain that multiple people had tried it and ruled it out in multiple ways. That made people perceive me as close-minded, stupid, and inflexible. Instead I just nodded and said, interesting, that's worth checking out, thanks, or, hmm, I wonder how I could measure that.

At first I was afraid that if I acted intrigued about a very basic obvious idea, people would think we were idiots for not trying it long ago, but that turned out not to be the dominant dynamic at work. The dominant dynamic was that people think you're smart if you are receptive to your advice, and and they think you are stupid if you are not receptive to their advice. This only stops being true when you work with someone closely or consistently over time.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#154

Post by gavmor »

dkarl wrote: post #153

I once inherited a very thorny performance problem with a service. Thorny as in, the previous engineer was ordered to give up and move on because our boss was worried it was adversely affecting their mental health and their performance on other tasks. I quickly learned that every person who found out I was working on this problem was eager to share the same three or four ideas on how to fix it. All of these ideas wer…

It seems like you found a good strategy.

I might have tried earnest curiosity. "And what results would you expect from that?" or "Let's say we do this, and get such-and-such result?" or "What kind of result would diminish your confidence in this approach?"

Or, better yet, invite them to pair on the implementation! (Organizational agility permitting.)

I wonder, also, why were none of these "dead ends" accessibly documented? If so many people can offer suggestions, shouldn't they be able to see the results of prior experiments? Maybe in the form of closed tickets, at the very least.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#155

Post by akomtu »

konschubert wrote: post #25

I often wonder into which of these two categories I fall with my epaper calendars. On the one hand, I’ve been working on this product for four years, put every free minute into it, and it still doesn’t make enough money for me to quit my job. On the other hand, the product keeps getting better as I work on it, and I have now sold 500 of them. But sometimes I feel like I can’t keep going like this. Two jobs and a fami…

A few ideas:

1. Talk to some decent designers. The wooden frame feels a bit dull. Make the frame customizable.

2. This isn't just a calendar, but a todo list where you and your wife can add things to buy or to do, from your phones. This screen on the wall makes the list real.

3. This screen can show home stats: energy and water usage, weather, etc.

4. Add an option with touch screen. Removing a todo item by touching the screen is better than finding your phone and connecting it to the eink screen.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#156

Post by nucleardog »

konschubert wrote: post #25

I often wonder into which of these two categories I fall with my epaper calendars. On the one hand, I’ve been working on this product for four years, put every free minute into it, and it still doesn’t make enough money for me to quit my job. On the other hand, the product keeps getting better as I work on it, and I have now sold 500 of them. But sometimes I feel like I can’t keep going like this. Two jobs and a fami…

What’s the refresh rate when displaying an image?

It’s been on my todo list to do something like this to help my four year old get some insight into “why we do things when we do them”, but she’s still at the age where a calendar/clock/general sense of time are a little difficult to understand sometimes.

My plan was to set up a display that was more “kid friendly images annotated around the outside of a clock” and maybe some bars that fill/empty as we get close to certain things (like bedtime) so she has more opportunity to understand how much time she has left and decide how she wants to use it.

If it refreshes frequently enough, this definitely looks workable for that for the time being and still serves a purpose in the future as a family calendar.

Which I guess also raises the question—how much of this is dependent on cloud services? Obviously the website display, but could it fetch and render an image or ICS file without an internet connection?

(None of this is probably helpful as far as evolving the product, just asking because you’re here and clicking a buy button would take a thing off my todo list.)

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#157

Post by mkoubaa »

I think the term tenacious fits better than persistent here.

Another thing that I think distinguishes a tenacious person from a stubborn one is that when two tenacious people collaborate, magic happens. When two stubborn people meet, they cancel out.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#158

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

munificent wrote: post #58

I like this article a lot. I think a lot of the distinction between persistence and obstinance comes down to identity, attachment, and self esteem. Almost everyone who is persistent or obstinant has something to prove. They have some deep-seated feeling that they need to demonstrate something to their community, a sense that maybe their value is in some ways conditional on what they provide. Content people who feel a…

Great comment.

I remember someone I knew, saying “I can’t tell if it’s an asset or a defect! If I’m stubborn, it’s a defect, but if I’m tenacious, it’s an asset.”

> That's no indictment of contentment, maybe changing the world is overrrated.

I think a significant number of “world-changers” have not had personal happy endings. They may have done a lot of good, but it didn’t do much for their own personal happiness.

I tend to be “tenacious,” but I also like to do really high-Quality work, so it may look like “stubbornness,” to a lot of folks.

For example, I have spent the entire day, today, tweaking haptics and voiceover text in the app I’m developing. I became aware of a very small, rare, cosmetic bug, that most folks would shrug off, but it really bothers me, and I’m going to make sure it gets fixed, tomorrow.

Re: The Right Kind of Stubborn

#159

Post by ajkjk »

konschubert wrote: post #43
ajkjk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a marketing problem. It wouldn't be weird at all to see that at every bookstore in the country. So why isn't it there? Are you focusing on making the product better forever, instead of getting it in front of people, or tuning it to what they are most eager to pay for, or tuning the website to get more sales? What beliefs are causing you to make that mistake? Are you scared of those parts, and therefore av…

Two things: I am not sure if marketing is the bottleneck or the product itself - I have been getting inconsistent feedback on that. On the marketing side, I’ve been trying to make the website better and i have been playing with Google and instagram ads. I don’t even dislike marketing - but I don’t think I’m very good at it. I could try to pay for this competency, but I’m scared of losing bunch of money.

Well, I'm no expert, but I can say what I think. First, your product looks awesome.

But I do think the landing page is a _little_ less good than it probably could be, but I'm not sure I can say exactly why. I bet there is some company out there that could take this thing from an obscure product to a Christmas staple, if they got their hands on it. Maybe there is a way that you could do it in a profit-sharing way so you're not taking a financial risk yourself. After all that is the point of venture capital also: they fund the endeavor and then own part of it.

My one suggestion would be de-emphasizing "you can do whatever you want with it" and emphasizing "here are the things that you can easily do with it". Because most people aren't gonna do any customization, or at least, will be intimidated by that. The ideal impression is that I might impulse-buy it because it's a cool desktop calendar, but then use it in other ways afterwards, and power users might get it for the customization features.

(couple other small things: that _particular_ NYT article makes kind of a weird impression. Maybe make something that doesn't involve a picture of Trump? People hate Trump and they hate seeing pictures of him also. Also, the phrase "an acquired taste" is not worth including. Black and white is stylish! someone who wants that is going to already know they like it.)

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